Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

It was Lucullus, embittered and determined on the ruin of his in-laws, who had first made the rumours of incest public. On his return from the East he had openly accused his wife of sleeping with her brother and divorced her. Clodius’ eldest and dearest sister, who had let him into her bed when he had been a small boy, nervous of night-time fears, inevitably found her own name blackened by such a charge as well. In Rome censoriousness was the mirror-image of a drooling appetite for lurid fantasy. Just as it endlessly thrilled Caesar’s contemporaries to think of him as the bed partner of the King of Bithynia, so the pleasure that Clodius’ enemies took in the accusations of incest against him never staled. No smoke without fire – and there must have been something unusual about Clodius’ relations with his three sisters to have set tongues wagging. Throughout his career, he was to display a taste for pushing experience to the edge, and so it is perfectly possible that the gossip-mongers knew what they were talking about. Just as plausibly, however, the rumours could have been fuelled by the uses to which Clodia put her status as a society beauty. ‘In the dining room a cock-teaser, in the bedroom an iceblock’:⁹ this gallant description of her by a former lover suggests the care with which she exploited her sexual appeal. For any woman, even one of Clodia’s rank, dabbling in politics was a high-wire act. Roman morality did not look kindly on female forwardness. Frigidity was the ultimate marital ideal. It was taken for granted, for instance, that ‘a matron has no need of lascivious squirmings’¹⁰ – anything more than a rigid, dignified immobility was regarded as the mark of a prostitute. Likewise, a woman whose conversation was witty and free laid herself open to an identical charge. If she then compounded her offences by engaging in political intrigue, she could hardly be regarded as anything other than a monster of depravity. Seen in such a light, the charges of incest against Clodia were hardly surprising. Indeed, they marked her out as a player in the political game.

Misogyny alone, however, savage and unrelenting though it was, does not entirely explain the vehemence of the abuse that society hostesses such as Clodia provoked. Women had no choice but to exert their influence behind the scenes, by stealth, teasing and seducing those they wished to influence, luring them into what moralists were quick to denounce as a feminine world of gossip and sensuality. To the already ferociously nuanced world of male ambition, this added a perilous new complication. The qualities required to take advantage of it were precisely those that had always been most scorned in the Republic. Cicero, not one of life’s natural party animals, listed them in salacious detail: an aptitude for ‘debauchery’, ‘love affairs’, ‘staying up all night to the din of loud music’, ‘sleeping around’ and ‘spending cash to the point of ruin’.¹¹ The final, clinching disgrace, and the ultimate mark of a dangerous reprobate, was to be a good dancer. In the eyes of traditionalists nothing could be more scandalous. A city that indulged a dance culture was one on the point of catastrophe. Cicero could even claim, with a perfectly straight face, that it had been the ruin of Greece. ‘Back in the old days,’ he thundered, ‘the Greeks used to stamp down on that kind of thing. They recognised the potential deadliness of the plague, how it would gradually rot the minds of its citizens with pernicious manias and ideas, and then, all at once, bring about a city’s total collapse.’¹² By the standards of that diagnosis, Rome was in peril indeed. To the party set, the mark of a good night out, and the city’s cutting-edge craze, was to become ecstatically drunk and then, to the accompaniment of ‘shouts and screams, the whooping of girls and deafening music’,¹³ to strip naked and dance wildly on tables.

Roman politicians had always been divided more by style than by issues of policy. The increasing extravagance of Rome’s party scene served to polarise them even further. Clearly, it was an excruciating embarrassment for traditionalists that so many of their standard-bearers had themselves succumbed to the temptations of luxury: men such as Lucullus and Hortensius were ill-placed to wag the finger at anyone. Even so, the ancient frugalities of the Republic still endured. Indeed, for a new generation of senators, the backdrop of modish excess made them appear more, not less, inspiring. Even as it wallowed in gold, the Senate remained an instinctively conservative body, reluctant to glimpse a true reflection of itself, preferring to imagine itself a model of rectitude still. Politicians able to convince their fellow senators that this was more than just a fantasy might accrue considerable prestige. Sternness and austerity continued to play well.

It is hard otherwise to explain the remarkable authority of a man who in the mid-sixties BC had only just turned thirty, and held no office higher than the quaestorship. At an age when most senators would sit in respectful silence to listen to their seniors, Marcus Porcius Cato had a voice that boomed out across the Senate House floor. Rough and unadorned, it appeared to sound directly from the rugged, virtuous days of the earliest Republic. As an officer, Cato had ‘shared in everything he ordered his men to do. He wore what they wore, ate what they ate, marched as they marched.’¹⁴ As a civilian, he made a fashion out of despising fashion, wearing black because the party set all sported purple, walking everywhere, whether in blazing sunshine or icy rain, despising every form of luxury, sometimes not even bothering to put on his shoes. If there was more than a hint of affectation about this, then it was also the expression of a profoundly held moral purpose, an incorruptibility and inner strength that the Romans still longed to identify with themselves, but had rather assumed were confined to the history books. To Cato, however, the inheritance of the past was something infinitely sacred. Duty and service to his fellow citizens were all. Only after he had fully studied the responsibilities of the quaestorship had he been prepared to put himself up for election. Once in office, such was his probity and diligence that it was said he ‘made the quaestorship as worthy of honour as a consulship’.¹⁵ Plagued by a sense of its own corruption as it was, the Senate was not yet so degenerate that it could fail to be impressed by such a man.

To the grandees of the previous generation in particular, Cato served as an inspiration. They were quick to see in him the future of the Republic. Lucullus, for instance, eager to hand on his torch to a successor, chose to celebrate his divorce by marrying Cato’s half-sister. His new bride was an improvement on the old one only in the sense that her affairs were not incestuous, but the unfortunate Lucullus, once again saddled with a party girl for a wife, forbore for years to divorce her, out of respect for Cato. This did not mean that Cato himself was prepared to extend any special favours to his brother-in-law; far from it. If he believed that the good of the Republic was at stake, he would prosecute Lucullus’ friends, and indeed take on anyone whom he believed required a lesson in virtue. On occasions he even went so far as to lecture Catulus. Cato was not prepared to take part in the intrigues that everyone else took for granted, a display of inflexibility that would often baffle and infuriate his allies. Cicero, who admired Cato deeply, could nevertheless bitch that ‘he addresses the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus’.¹⁶ Such criticism seriously underestimated Cato’s political acumen. Indeed, in many ways his strategy was the polar opposite of Cicero’s, who had made an entire career out of testing the limits of compromise. Cato moved to the rhythms of no one’s principles but his own. Drawing his strength from the most austere traditions of the Republic, he fashioned himself into a living reproach to the frivolities of his age.

It was a deliberate tactic on Cato’s part to make his enemies, in comparison to his own imposing example, appear all the more vicious and effeminate. Chasing after women and staying out drunk were not expressions of machismo to the Romans; the very opposite, in fact. Indulgence threatened potency. Gladiators, in the week before a fight, might need to have their foreskins fitted with metal bolts to infibulate them, but citizens were supposed to rely on self-control. To surrender to sensuality was to cease to be a man. Just as domineering women such as Clodia might be portrayed as vampires, ‘sapping’¹⁷ the appetites of those who succumbed to their charms, so gilded rakes like Clodius were savaged as creatures less than women. With unwearying relish, the same charge was repeated time and again.

Yet for all that this abuse reflected deeply held prejudices, there was something nervy and shrill about it. No Roman ever bothered striking at an enemy he did not fear. The signs of effeminacy were also the signs of knowingness, of superiority, of savoir faire. Fashion served the function it has always done: of distinguishing those who followed it from the common herd. In a society as competitive as the Republic this gave it an obvious and immediate appeal. Rome was filled with ambitious young men, all of them desperate for marks of public status. To be a member of the smart set was to sport precisely such marks. So it was that fashion victims would adopt secret signals, mysterious gestures such as the scratching of the head with a single finger. They grew goatees; their tunics flowed to the ankles and wrists; their togas had the texture and transparency of veils and they wore them, in a much-repeated phrase, ‘loosely belted’.¹⁸

This, of course, was precisely how Julius Caesar had dressed in the previous decade. It is a revealing correspondence. In the sixties as in the seventies, Caesar continued to blaze a trail as the most fashionable man in Rome. He spent money as he wore his toga, with a nonchalant flamboyance. His most dandyish stunt was to commission a villa in the countryside and then, the moment it had been built, tear it down for not measuring up to his exacting standards. Extravagance such as this led many of his rivals to despise him. Yet Caesar was laying down stakes in a high-risk game. To be the darling of the smart set was no idle thing. The risk, of course, was that it might result in ruin – not merely financial, but political too. It was noted by his shrewder enemies, however, that he never let his partying put his health at risk. His eating habits were as frugal as Cato’s. He rarely drank. If his sexual appetites were notorious, then he was careful to choose his long-term partners with a cool and searching caution. Cornelia, his wife, had died back in 69 BC and Caesar, looking for a new bride, had fixed his eye on Pompeia, the granddaughter of Sulla, no less. Throughout his career, Caesar was to prove himself keenly aware of the need for good intelligence, and this was as evident in his selection of mistresses as in his choice of a wife. The great love of his life was Servilia – who just happened to be the half-sister of Cato, and therefore the sister-in-law of Lucullus. Just for good measure, she was also Catulus’ cousin. Who knows what family confidences Servilia may have whispered into her lover’s ear?

No wonder that Caesar’s enemies grew to be wary of his resources of charm. Just as he thought nothing of blowing a fortune on a single pearl for Servilia, so he mortgaged his future to seduce his fellow citizens. More outrageously than anyone had ever done before, he translated the party spirit into the dimension of public life. In 65 BC, at the age of thirty-five, he became aedile. This was not a magistracy that it was obligatory for would-be consuls to have held, but it was popular all the same, because aediles were responsible for the staging of public games. As such, it was an opportunity tailor-made for a showman such as Caesar. For the first time, gladiators were adorned in silver armour. Glittering magnificently, over three hundred pairs of them fought it out for the entertainment of the citizenry. The display would have been even more dazzling had not Caesar’s enemies rushed through legislation to limit the numbers. Senators could recognise a shameless bribe when they saw it. They also knew that no bribes were ever offered without an expectation of a return.

In the great game of personal advancement Caesar’s profligacy was a high-risk but deliberate gambit. His enemies might condemn him as an effeminate dandy, but they also had to acknowledge him as an increasingly heavyweight political contender. Caesar himself, every so often, would rub their noses in this fact. As aedile, he was responsible not only for the games, but for the upkeep of public places. One morning Rome woke to find all the trophies of Marius, long a non-person, restored. The Sullan establishment was appalled. After Caesar had coolly admitted his responsibility, Catulus went so far as to accuse him of assaulting the Republic with a battering ram. Caesar, playing the innocent, responded with outrage himself. Had Marius not been just as great a hero as Sulla? Was it not time for the rival factions to bury the hatchet? Were they not all citizens of the same republic, after all? The mob, assembling in Caesar’s support, roared out its answer: ‘Yes!’ Catulus was left to splutter impotently. The trophies stayed in place.

Episodes such as this served to demonstrate that the popularis tradition, scotched but not destroyed by Sulla, was starting to revive. It was a striking achievement – but it came at a cost. For the plebs, who idolised Caesar, his munificence was the key to his appeal, but his enemies could reasonably hope that it might also prove to be his downfall. Just as Cato was famous for his austerity, so Caesar was notorious for his debts. Everyone knew that a moment of reckoning would have to come. It duly arrived in 63 BC. Caesar, looking to break into the front rank of the Senate once and for all, and to colour his loose-belted image with a touch of more traditional prestige, chose to stake his entire career upon a single election. The post of Rome’s high priest, the pontifex maximus, had just become vacant. This was the most prestigious office in the Republic. The man elected to it held it until he died. Quite apart from the immense moral authority it bestowed, it also came with a mansion on the via Sacra, in the Forum. If Caesar became pontifex maximus, then he would be, literally, at the centre of Rome.

His opponent in the election was none other than that grandest of all grandees, Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Under normal circumstances, Catulus would have considered himself a shoo-in. The very fact of Caesar’s candidature was a scandal. Pontifex maximus had always been considered a post suitable for a distinguished former consul, and emphatically not for a politician on the make. Caesar, however, was not the man to be put off by a minor detail of tradition like that. Instead, he opted for his invariable strategy when confronted by a problem: he threw money at it. The electors were bribed on a monstrous scale. By now Caesar had stretched his credit to the limit. On the day that the result of the election was due to be announced he kissed Aurelia goodbye, then told her, ‘Mother, today you will either see me as high priest or I will be heading into exile.’¹⁹

As it proved, he would indeed be moving from the Subura – not into exile, but to his new mansion on the via Sacra. Caesar had pulled it off. He had been elected high priest. Once again, his extravagance had paid spectacular dividends. He had dared to gamble for massive stakes – against the status quo and the most ancient traditions of the Republic itself – and he had won.

Caelius’ Conspiracy

There were plenty who gambled and did not win. Caesar’s strategy of conspicuous extravagance was perilous. The promise of future greatness was staked against ruin. Money might be squandered, but never potential. Lose an election, fail to gain a lucrative posting, and a whole career might come crashing down.

It was no wonder that the provincial aristocracy, even as they fostered the ambitions of their sons, should also have slightly dreaded them. To send an heir to Rome was a calculated risk. Young men were easy prey to money-sharks. If a father were prudent, he would attempt to find patrons in the capital, mentors who might not only instruct his son in the labyrinthine ways of the Republic, but also protect him from the city’s many seductions. Particularly for families who had never held office in Rome, it was essential to secure the best. So it was, for instance, that when a banker by the name of Caelius Rufus succeeded in obtaining for his son the sponsorship of not only Crassus but Cicero too, the young Caelius was immediately marked out as a brilliant prospect. This in turn – ironically – served to secure him massive credit. When the usurers came swarming, Caelius welcomed them with open arms. Handsome, witty and buccaneering, the young man was soon developing a lifestyle far in excess of his allowance. He was too ambitious to neglect his education, but even as he studied under his two guardians he was simultaneously establishing a reputation as one of the three best dancers in Rome. New circles were opening to him – circles in which Cicero tended not to move. As he became ever more of a fixture on the party scene, Caelius began to fall under the spell of a whole new order of acquaintance.

And in particular of a louche patrician by the name of Lucius Sergius Catilina – Catiline. Caesar was not the only man to have founded a career on wild extravagance, nor was he the only aristocrat to have a chip on his shoulder about the bare walls of his atrium. Catiline’s great-grandfather had been a celebrated war hero, fighting against Hannibal with a prosthetic iron hand, but politically his ancestors had been an embarrassment. Even so, although there had been no consul in the family for almost four hundred years, Catiline’s patrician status provided him with cachet. He could pass muster, for instance, with the rigorously snobbish Catulus. Their friendship had been literally sealed with blood. Back in the dark days of the proscriptions, Catiline had helped Catulus to punish his father’s murderer. The wretched man had been whipped through the streets to where the tomb of Catulus’ father stood, his bones smashed with rods, his face mutilated, and only then put out of his misery by decapitation. To Catulus, this savagery had been a grim act of filial piety, a blood-offering to his father’s restless soul. Catiline had had no such excuse. After the murder he had brandished the severed – and supposedly still breathing – head back through the streets of Rome. Even by the standards of the civil war this was regarded as repellent behaviour. Although nothing was ever proved in a court of law, charges of murder, to say nothing of adultery and sacrilege, were to dog Catiline for the rest of his career. True, his sinister reputation was not always a handicap: among more raffish circles it combined with his stylishness and approachability to make him into a figure of menacing glamour. But while this served to provide him with a considerable constituency, it also placed him in a tactical bind. ‘His main appeal he targeted at the young’:²⁰ how long could Catiline continue to do this without alienating allies such as Catulus, let alone the majority of senators who already mistrusted him?

In an attempt to square the circle he turned to Crassus for help – or so at least the political gossip had it. No one could be sure, of course. Crassus’ manoeuvrings were invariably veiled in shadow. But one thing could be certain: Crassus, in the sixties BC, was a worried man. Once again he was faced with the prospect of being trumped by Pompey. Not only would his old rival soon be returning at the head of a seasoned army, but he would be stupefyingly wealthy: for the first time in his political career Crassus was threatened with losing his status as the richest man in Rome. No wonder that he was frantic to shore up his support. Catiline, with huge ambitions and even huger debts, must surely have struck him as well worth a punt.

It was not merely that Crassus was looking to have a tame consul elected. Catiline also promised other pickings. He was popular wherever the margins of political life were at their seamiest: among the bands of upper-class delinquents brawling in the Subura; among the salons of scheming, dissipated women; among the indebted, the disappointed and the impatient; in short, wherever respectability tipped over into the disreputable. For the abstemious Crassus, a former consul, such a world was clearly out of bounds, although Cicero commented waspishly that he would dance in the Forum if it would win him a legacy.²¹ That was as may be – but for as long as Crassus had Catiline as his creature, fishing in the murky waters of the underworld, glad-handing the salons, scheming with radicals in late-night bars, it was the proxy whose dignity was on the line.

It is impossible to distinguish what Caelius’ precise role was in all this. It is conceivable, of course, that he had first met Catiline through the agency of Crassus, whose dark political skills Caelius had been studying at first hand. It is even possible that Cicero was responsible for the introduction. In 65 BC a rapacious spell as the governor of Africa had finally caught up with Catiline, when Clodius, back in Rome from the East, and eager to make a mark in the law courts, charged him with extortion. At the same time Cicero, the new man, was nerving himself for an attempt on the consulship. He knew that Catiline was planning to stand as well, and so briefly considered defending him in his forthcoming trial, hoping that the two of them might then run for office the following year on a joint ticket. Catiline, however, turned down the offer with a sneer of patrician contempt. The trial held few fears for him. Sure enough, he was speedily acquitted, possibly with the collusion of Clodius, almost certainly with the assistance of hefty bribes from Crassus. He was now free to run for the consulship of 63 BC. Catiline and Cicero would be going head to head.

Caelius was by his guardian’s side throughout the election campaign. For a young politician who was himself a new man it must have been an intoxicating experience. The election was the most unpredictable in years. Cicero’s whole career had been a preparation for it, but Catiline, just as desperate, was attempting to make good four centuries of family failure. Snobbery formed the basis of his entire campaign. It was conducted in open alliance with another nobleman, Antonius Hybrida, a man so debauched and thuggish that it was hard to believe that he was the son of Cicero’s great hero, Marcus Antonius. Confronted by two such disreputable candidates, the aristocracy took a deep breath, held their noses, and voted for the least bad option. So too, with a good deal more enthusiasm, did the equestrian classes. Cicero won by a mile. Hybrida beat Catiline to a distant third place.

For any patrician, this would have been a humiliation. For Catiline, it threatened disaster: his debts were submerging him, and Crassus, in particular, would have no interest in sponsoring a loser. Yet Catiline had not abandoned all hope. As Cicero, draped in his purple-bordered toga, guarded by his lictors, a consul of the Roman people at last, began his year in office, so Catiline licked his wounds and plotted his comeback. His credit would last him until another election, and so he continued to borrow, lavishing everything on bribery. At the same time, rather than concealing the scale of his debts, he started to boast about them openly. This was a staggering risk, but, in the circumstances, one he had to take. The misery of indebtedness percolated far beyond the gilded seediness of his own circle. Italy seethed with the resentments of the oppressed, whether in the festering tenements of Rome or on barren farmland, where Sulla’s veterans, mortgaged to the hilt, scratched at dust and recalled the fat days of civil war. At private meetings Catiline began to promise the poor that he would be their champion. After all, as he pointed out, ‘Who was best qualified to be the leader and standard-bearer of the desperate, if not a man who was bold and desperate himself ?’²²

Cicero, who had been keeping a careful eye on Catiline, was only too willing to take such incendiary talk at face value. Was it possible, he began to wonder, that, having attained the honour of the consulship, he might now be granted the even more glorious honour of saving the Republic from revolution? The prospect filled him with a mixture of consternation and dizzied delight. He and Catiline, stalking each other, both had a vested interest in raising the stakes, in making the flesh of their respective audiences creep. But when at last the two men confronted each other openly in the Senate House, Catiline allowed his loathing of the tongue-wagging upstart opposite to push him into a fatal act of bravado. ‘I can see two bodies,’ he commented, not quite enigmatically enough, ‘one thin but with a large head, one huge, but headless. Is it really so terrible if I offer myself to the body which is lacking a head?’²³ His fellow aristocrats, the ‘large head’ of Catiline’s riddle, were ominously unamused. Wrapped in metaphor or not, revolutionary sentiments did not go down well in the Senate House. Catiline had effectively just lost himself a second successive election. Cicero, patrolling the Campus Martius on polling day, made sure to wear a breastplate beneath his toga, and made even more sure that the voters could glimpse it. As the results were announced and Catiline’s defeat became known, so the usurers flocked to pick at his corpse.

Like Caesar campaigning to be pontifex maximus, Catiline had staked everything on a single throw. He had gambled that it was possible to play Janus, showing one face to the senatorial and equestrian elite, the other to the poor, the indebted, the dispossessed. The gamble had failed. But if the establishment had turned its back on Catiline, then the underworld had not. He had stirred up hopes perhaps greater and more desperate than he knew. In the countryside, where peasants were starting to arm themselves with scythes and rusty swords, in Rome, where demonstrations were increasingly boiling over into riots, even in the Senate itself, where losers in the great game of advancement chafed against their debts and disappointments, talk of revolution still burned like sparks in the air. And there, sharing in the wild talk, was Marcus Caelius.

Why? Were the young man’s debts already so prodigious that he was prepared to risk all his hopes of legal advancement by taking part in revolution? Or was it the excitement, the whisperings of conspiracy, that tempted him? Or idealism? A fervour for Catiline’s cause certainly appears to have radicalised many brilliant young men. Generational tensions were more than capable of setting father against son. One senator preferred to kill his heir rather than see him consorting with Catiline, despite the fact that, like Caelius, the young man had been ‘outstandingly talented, well read, and good looking’.²⁴ Even Cicero was forced to admit that Catiline was ‘still capable of maintaining the loyalties of many fine men by putting on a show of moral fervour’.²⁵ So Caelius may have continued to support him for either the basest or the noblest of reasons, or a mixture of the two. But there is a further possibility: it is conceivable that Caelius may not have been supporting Catiline at all. Headstrong as he was, he was also more than capable of a calculating cynicism. Perhaps he was providing his guardian with a pair of well-placed eyes.

Cicero certainly still needed well-placed spies. Following Catiline’s failure in the election, the consul’s forebodings of revolution had become increasingly alarmist. People were starting to demand proof. And then, just as nervousness was turning to mockery, a packet of letters was suddenly delivered to Cicero’s house. They set out Catiline’s plans for a wholesale massacre. The man who handed over these incriminating documents was none other than Crassus. He claimed that they had been handed in to his doorkeeper by an ‘unknown man’.²⁶ When Cicero read the letters out to the Senate the following morning, panic gripped the city. A state of emergency was declared, and the Republic entrusted to Cicero’s hands. Crassus, having publicly shopped his protégé, slunk back into the shadows. In reading accounts of this improbable story it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Catiline was not the only conspirator in that autumn of 63. Who might the ‘unknown man’ have been? We know of only one person who was simultaneously an intimate of Cicero, Crassus and Catiline. That person was Caelius.

Wild speculation, of course. Any or all of the above explanations are possible. But it is not sufficient to blame a lack of sources alone for the mystery. It also reflects something fundamental about the Republic itself. The longing of the Romans for glory, which burned brightly within them and lit their city and indeed their entire empire with its flame, also cast flickering and treacherous shadows. Every ambitious politician required the skills of a conspirator. When Cicero met Catiline for the last time, face to face in the Senate House, he dissected his enemy’s manoeuvrings with forensic brilliance, exposing them to the full scorching glare of his outrage, picking over the details of the conspiracy to such effect that Catiline fled Rome that very night. Ever after Cicero was to regard this as his finest hour, ‘a pinnacle of immortal glory’,²⁷ as he modestly expressed it. The image of himself as the dauntless protector of the Republic, a patriot pure and simple, would provide him with the touchstone for the rest of his career. It was a perspective that Catiline, unsurprisingly, failed to share. Before leaving Rome he had written to Catulus, still protesting his innocence, bitterly complaining that he had been manoeuvred into exile. Heading north, ostensibly towards retirement in Marseille, he had in fact turned aside to take command of a ragbag army of peasants and war veterans. Meanwhile, back in Rome, more spine-tingling details of his plots, fed to the Senate at judicious intervals, had started to emerge: Gauls in the north of Italy were to rise in savage revolt; slaves were to be freed; the city itself was to be put to the torch. The whole of Rome was engulfed by hysteria. Cicero was the hero of the hour. Yet a few dissenting voices could still be heard. The crisis had been manufactured, they whispered. Catiline had been right. It was Cicero who had pushed him into his revolt, Cicero and his vainglory, Cicero the upstart, greedy for fame.

Of course, as is invariably the way with conspiracy theories, hard proof was lacking. No one was on hand to subject Cicero to the kind of grilling that he himself had given Catiline. The truth remained obscured behind a haze of disinformation. It was certainly evident that Cicero had employed dirty tricks to smoke out his enemy, but how much further than that he might have gone was impossible to say. Yet, in a sense he would have been less a Roman had he not schemed to push his enemy over the edge. Every consul dreamed of stamping his term of office with glory. That was how the game of self-advancement was played. Cicero may not have behaved according to the standards of his own propaganda, but then again – apart from Cato – who ever did?

And it was Catiline, after all, who had first upped the stakes. The civil war had shown how quickly violence could escalate. In a society as competitive as Rome’s even to talk of forcing short cuts through the constitution was perilous, like tossing a flame on to a tinder box. This explains why Cicero was so anxious to erect firebreaks around Catiline. He feared that if the conspirators were not isolated, then the conflagration might quickly spread out of control. Sure enough, no sooner had Catulus accepted that Catiline had indeed been plotting to destroy the Republic than he was attempting to finger Crassus and, just for good measure, Caesar too. Cicero may have had his own suspicions on that account, but Catulus’ move was precisely the kind he was desperate to avoid. He had no wish to see a man like Crassus backed into a corner.

On 5 December, with panic-stricken rumours growing wilder by the hour, he convened a crisis meeting of the Senate. All the conspiracy’s ringleaders in Rome had been identified and arrested, he announced. Neither Crassus’ nor Caesar’s name appeared on the list. Even so, the great debate that followed was at least as much about the hatreds and ambitions of the various speakers as it was about the conspiracy itself. At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.

Among their number was a former consul. Watched by a confused and frightened crowd, he was led through the Forum, Cicero by his side, bristling with grim self-importance, four other senators following in quick succession. With the shadows of twilight deepening over the city, the five prisoners were lowered into the blackness of an underground cell. Here they were garrotted. Cicero, emerging from the gloom, tersely announced their deaths to the crowd. Many in the Forum were friends of the executed men, and they now slunk away, but throughout the rest of the city the news was greeted with an explosion of applause. A blaze of torches illumined the road that led from the Forum up to Cicero’s house. As the consul climbed it he was escorted by a phalanx of the greatest names in Rome. All acclaimed him as the saviour of his country. Surely, not even in his wildest dreams could the provincial from Arpinum ever have imagined such a day.

What had impressed his colleagues was not merely that he appeared to have saved the Republic, but that he had done so with comparatively little bloodshed. Cicero himself remained desperate to preserve a fire-wall around the conspiracy. He refused, for instance, to investigate his fellow consul, Antonius Hybrida, despite the fact that Hybrida had been one of Catiline’s closest friends. Cicero bribed his colleague with the governorship of Macedon, a rich province that would more than enable him to pay off his debts, and command of the war against Catiline. Since Hybrida was not merely suspected of double-dealing with the rebels, but was also a coward and an alcoholic to boot, this provoked much unease. Allies of Pompey began to press for the great man’s recall. This in turn provoked an eruption of outrage from Cato, who announced that he would rather die than see Pompey given an Italian command. But if anyone had genuinely stood in Pompey’s way, it was Cicero. The prospect of a Rome pushed into armed factions, their rivalry escalating into ever greater violence, degenerating in the end into open civil war, this had been his ultimate nightmare. Nothing would have provided Pompey with a more perfect excuse to intervene with his legions. It was in this sense that Cicero had indeed saved the Republic, less from Catiline, perhaps, than from itself.

In the summer of 62 BC, just a few bare months before Pompey was due back in Italy, Catiline’s makeshift army was finally cornered and destroyed. Hybrida, succumbing to a diplomatic illness, spent the entire battle in his tent, then scuttled off to Macedon, to extract his blood-money but otherwise lie low. He was not alone in beating a tactical retreat from Rome. Humbler players in the conspiracy were also slipping away. Among them was Caelius. He travelled to Africa, where his father had extensive business holdings, staffed with protective subordinates. But Caelius had far from abandoned his political career. For a year he served in Africa as an aide-de-camp to the province’s newly appointed proconsul, and did so very successfully. Whatever Caelius’ precise role in the conspiracy had been, his future still lay all before him. He had seen enough of public life to know that nothing in it was for ever. Alliances might buckle, twist and be reversed. The heroes of one year might be the villains of the next. In the blink of an eye the political landscape might be utterly transformed.

And so it would soon dramatically prove.

Scandal

Early every December women from the noblest families in the Republic would gather to celebrate the mysterious rites of the Good Goddess. The festival was strictly off limits to men. Even their statues had to be veiled for the occasion. Such secrecy fuelled any number of prurient male fantasies. Every citizen knew that women were depraved and promiscuous by nature. Surely a festival from which men were banned had to be a scene of lubricious abandon? Not that any male had ever dared take a peek to confirm this thrilling suspicion. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of Roman religion that even those who sniggered at it also tended to regard it with awe. Men, just as much as women, honoured the Good Goddess. She was one of the divine protectors of Rome. Clearly, should her rites be profaned, the sacrilege might threaten the security of all.

In the winter of 62 BC the matrons had particular reason to pray for the Good Goddess’s favour. Catiline was dead, but fears and rumours still gusted through the Forum. After a leisurely saunter on the tourist trail around Greece, Pompey had finally arrived on the Adriatic coast. It was said that he would be crossing to Italy before the end of the month. What would it be like for other ambitious noblemen, having to live like pygmies in the shadow of Pompey the Great? It was a question of particular concern to the two women who presided over the rites of the Good Goddess: Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, and Pompeia, his wife. The pontifex maximus himself, although he had provided his mansion for the occasion, was naturally not present. Along with every other male in his household, free and slave alike, Caesar had withdrawn for the night.

The mansion began to fill with incense, music and great ladies. Now, for a few brief hours, it was the city’s women who held the safety of Rome in their hands. There was no longer any call for them to skulk in the shadows, afraid of prying eyes. Yet one of Aurelia’s maids, looking for some music, observed a flute-girl who was doing exactly that. She approached her; the flute-girl shrank away. When the maid demanded to know who she was, the flute-girl shook her head, then mumbled Pompeia’s name. The maid shrieked. Dressed in a long-sleeved tunic and breastband the stranger might have been, but the voice had been unmistakably male. Uproar ensued. Aurelia, frantically covering up the sacred statues of the goddess, suspended the rites. The other women went in search of the impious intruder. They finally found him, hidden in the room of one of Pompeia’s maids. Off came the veil of the bogus flute-girl to reveal … Clodius.

Such at least was the story that immediately swept like wildfire around Rome. Gossip convulsed the city. Friends and enemies of Clodius alike huddled to swap the salacious details. If sporting a goatee or touching the head with a finger could be considered marks of effeminacy, then Clodius, by dressing up in women’s clothes and gatecrashing a sacred ritual, had clearly taken offensiveness to a whole new level. Overnight he became the toast of every loose-belted dandy and the bogey of every conservative in Rome. Caught in the middle, deeply embarrassed by the affair, was Caesar. Naturally, he had to affect outrage. Not only had Clodius violated the pontifical house, but it was also rumoured that he had been planning to violate Pompeia herself. Cuckolded Roman husbands had been known to set their slaves on adulterers, to beat them, rape them, even castrate them; at the very least Caesar would have been justified in dragging Clodius through the courts. But the pontifex had an image problem: despite his elevated religious status, he remained a topic of fevered gossip himself, the rake who had been labelled ‘a man for every woman, and a woman for every man’.²⁸ For Caesar to adopt the tone of the moral majority might open him to even greater ridicule, quite apart from making an enemy of Clodius and alienating the fast set who were his natural supporters. After all, he was planning to run for the consulship within a couple of years. Clodius was far too well connected, and capricious, to risk offending. In the end Caesar resolved his dilemma by divorcing Pompeia, but refusing to say why: ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’²⁹ was his single, Delphic comment. Then, before anyone could press him further, he slipped away to Spain, where he was due to serve as governor. It was a measure of his eagerness to be away from Rome that he arrived in his new province before the Senate had even had time to confirm his appointment.

Caesar’s departure did nothing to dim the obsession with the scandal. The continuing hysteria that surrounded Clodius’ stunt submerged even the news of Pompey’s arrival. This, contrary to most people’s fears, passed off without any great alarms. Rather than marching on Rome, the returning proconsul dismissed his army, then headed for the capital ‘unarmed, with no one to escort him save a few intimate friends, for all the world as though he were returning from a holiday abroad’.³⁰ Pompey’s shows of simplicity were always ostentatious. The crowds who lined the route of his progress duly cheered themselves hoarse. His rivals back in Rome, however, were less easily impressed. Now that they no longer needed to fear Pompey they could concentrate on the far more pleasurable activity of cutting him down to size. To everyone’s delight, his first public speech was a flop. Pompey’s blend of pomposity and false modesty presented his enemies with an irresistible target. When he complacently commended the Senate for suppressing Catiline, Crassus was immediately up on his feet, praising Cicero to the skies, lauding him in ludicrously exaggerated terms, claiming that he never looked at his wife or home without thanking Cicero for their continued existence. Cicero himself, completely failing to recognise the irony, was thrilled. He had always idolised Pompey, and to be praised like this in the great man’s presence was heaven. Yet even he had to acknowledge that his hero, listening to Crassus’ speech, had appeared a little ‘peeved’.³¹

This was hardly surprising. Pompey had recently been hearing a good deal from Cicero. The previous year, while he had still been in Greece, a huge letter had thudded on to his reading desk, a book-length self-promotion in which the former consul had presumed to compare his achievements to those of the new Alexander. Pompey’s response had been withering. For Cicero, whose conceit still veiled gnawing insecurities, the cold dismissal by his hero had been deeply hurtful. He consoled himself with the thought that Pompey was jealous, but the rebuff had wounded not merely his vanity, but his entire vision of the future of Rome. As was so often the case with Cicero, the two went hand in hand. Yes, it was he who had saved the Republic, but, as he modestly acknowledged, he could never have done it without the support of his fellow citizens. The year of his consulship had been their, as well as his, finest hour. Surely this sense of common purpose could be maintained? What was a republic, after all, if not a partnership of interest and justice? Naturally, Cicero himself, as ‘the saviour of his country’, would have to remain at the helm, but he graciously accepted that other leading figures, Pompey especially, would also have their parts to play. All citizens – senators, equestrians and poor alike – would live in harmony. Self-interest would be subordinated to the interests of Rome.

As a manifesto, of course, this was a vision of cloud-cuckoo-land. It was hardly as though Cicero himself had been immune to ambition. Liberty – and the opportunity for an outsider to win the consulship – would be stifled by a society in which everyone knew his place. It was a paradox that was to torture Cicero all his life. His blueprint for the future, however impractical, was the product of much agonised reflection. Cicero was proud to consider himself the heir of the Republic’s noblest traditions. Chief among these was the age-old balance between ambition and duty. Should this be upset, then criminals might start to hack their way to the top, and tyrants to emerge. Catiline had been foiled – but he was bound to have successors. It was essential that they too be destroyed. After all, what hope was there for the Republic if the great were not the good?

The passion with which Cicero held such opinions did not encourage him to look indulgently on Clodius’ prank. Surely only a Catiline in the making could have committed such a shocking offence? Adding to Cicero’s mounting excitement was his sense that, just as it had done in the glory days of his consulship, the Senate was closing ranks. Despite the fact that there was no law against gatecrashing the goddess’s rites, a powerful groundswell of opinion was starting to move in favour of declaring it a crime. A vote was taken. It was agreed that Clodius should be brought to trial. The size of the majority reflected not only genuine outrage, but, as ever in Rome, the venom of personal hatreds. Clodius did not lack for enemies. Chief among those, of course, was Lucullus. It took a special occasion to drag him from his fish-ponds. One of these had been his triumph, back in 63, which Cicero, as consul, had finally succeeded in authorising. Lucullus had used the event as an opportunity for point-scoring. His accounts had been carried on huge billboards through the streets, stating precisely how much he had paid his soldiers – the princely sum of nine hundred and fifty drachmas each. Clearly, the dagger-blow of the mutiny had not ceased to ache. Now, two years later, Lucullus eagerly re-emerged. He could smell Clodius’ blood. Preparing for the trial, he rehearsed all his old resentments: the mutiny, the incest of his wife. He also persuaded Hortensius to bestir himself and lead the prosecution. A formidable array of witnesses began to be assembled. Notable among these was Aurelia. Whatever the qualms of her son, she was more than willing to confirm that, yes, she had seen Clodius in her house on the fateful night.

But Clodius had powerful friends of his own. Leading his defence was one of the most illustrious figures in the Senate, a former consul no less, Gaius Scribonius Curio. Following standard procedure, Curio had no sooner accepted the case than he set about manufacturing an alibi for his client. An equestrian was found who was prepared to testify that Clodius had spent the day of the Good Goddess’s rites with him, ninety miles away from the scene of the supposed crime. It was now up to Hortensius to trump this evidence. It did not take him long. A witness was found for the prosecution, and a most impressive one too. It turned out that on the day of the festival of the Good Goddess Cicero had been with Clodius, not ninety miles away, but in the heart of Rome.

Would he testify to this effect, however? For all Cicero’s horror at Clodius’ alleged behaviour, it was still an agonising decision. There had been no history of enmity between the two men. During Cicero’s consulship Clodius had even served as one of his bodyguards. More than that, they were now neighbours. Cicero had recently gone up in the world – literally so. Following his consulship he had bought a splendid house on the Palatine, mortgaging himself to the hilt in order to do so, but feeling that his new status more than justified the expense. He was, after all, the saviour of the Republic. From the portico of his poplar-shaded mansion he could now look down at the Forum, the most exclusive view in the world. The neighbours included not only Clodius, but his glamorous sister. Cicero was proud of his intimacy with Rome’s haughtiest family, so much so, in fact, that his wife accused Clodia of angling to seduce him.

According to gossip, Cicero was nagged so relentlessly about this that he decided to testify against Clodius merely to win some peace. His wife should have saved her breath. In the final reckoning an opportunity to line up with the cream of the senatorial elite was simply too tempting for Cicero to resist. His appearance duly caused a sensation. As he stepped forward to give his evidence the baying of Clodius’ supporters rose in a crescendo. Gangs imported from the slums had been milling around the Forum for weeks, intimidating Clodius’ enemies, marshalled by the son of Clodius’ advocate, a young man dismissed by Cicero as ‘Curio’s little daughter’,³² but a reckless, dangerous opponent all the same. On this occasion, however, his tactics backfired. Nothing served to bolster Cicero’s courage more than the feeling that he was the star of a show. As the jurors rallied to form a human shield around him, he gave his evidence in a clear, unshaken voice. The next day a crowd gathered outside his house to roar their approval. Clodius’ conviction appeared to have been sealed. The jurors asked for bodyguards in turn.

But stalwart in defence of Cicero though they had been, they were to acquit themselves less impressively when over the next couple of days a mysterious slave began knocking at their doors. Offers of cash were dangled before them, and the favours of women or upper-class boys as they preferred. The flagrancy of this approach reaped a decisive reward. Clodius was acquitted by thirty-one votes to twenty-five. His enemies exploded with fury. Catulus, meeting one of the jurors, asked him sulphurously, ‘Was this why you wanted a bodyguard, then? To make sure that your bribes would be safely guarded?’³³

For all the grandees – Lucullus especially – Clodius’ acquittal was a bitter blow. For Cicero, however, it was a disaster. Lacking the resources of a Catulus or Hortensius, he now found himself confronted by an enemy whom even Caesar had been reluctant to provoke. In the weeks following the trial he did not help matters by baiting Clodius in the Senate with a succession of ill-considered sallies. What had originally been an animosity typical of many relationships in Rome now rapidly began to spiral into a full-blown blood-feud. Clodius may not have been Cicero’s equal as a wit, but in the nursing of vendettas he was soon to prove himself without peer.

To Cicero himself, personal catastrophe was always a crisis for the whole of Rome. On other occasions, however, he would have acknowledged that the savagery of political life was the index of its liberty. Fortunes rose, fortunes fell; alliances were forged, alliances fell apart. These were the rhythms of a free republic. The fact that the gloss of his consulship was rapidly vanishing may have been upsetting to Cicero, but it was a source of quiet satisfaction to most of his colleagues. Achievement in Rome was valued, but excessive greatness was feared. Many could share in power, but no one man could rule supreme. Only Sulla had done that – and he had soon retired.

What reason was there to think that this would ever change?

TRIUMVIRATE

Cato’s Gambit

On 28 September 61 BC Pompey the Great rode for the third time in a triumph through Rome. Even by his own standards it was a show of unparalleled magnificence. At its heart, naturally, was the conquering hero himself. For the benefit of spectators who did not have grandstand views, a huge portrait bust was carried in the procession, fashioned entirely out of pearls. Its predominant feature was an immaculate quiff. This was the same hairstyle Pompey had displayed in his first triumph, eighteen years previously. The role of boy wonder had proved a hard one to let slip. So sensitive was Pompey about his age that he had even arranged for his triumph to start on the day before his birthday – his forty-fifth. Not that this was a detail he chose to broadcast. Sporting the cloak as well as the quiff of Alexander, he had no wish to appear as mutton dressed as lamb. Alexander had famously died young, at the age of thirty-two. Pompey had already spent a whole decade being thirty-four.

Only with a career of short cuts behind him could a Roman have suffered a mid-life crisis of this nature. Most of Pompey’s countrymen yearned for their forties. Middle age was the prime of a citizen’s life, and for the upper classes a time when they could at last run for the consulship. To the Romans, the cult of youth appeared unsettling and foreign, a delusion to which kings in particular were prone. Greek potentates were forever attempting to hold back the years, whether by preserving their youth in images of marble or by raising pompous monuments to themselves. A Roman was expected to know better. After all, what was the lifeblood of the Republic if not the onward passage of time? Each year magistrate gave way to magistrate, and the man who relived his term of office excessively, as Cicero did, became a figure of ridicule. As water was used to dilute wine, so time was relied upon to dissipate the headiness of glory. The Romans, precisely because they had a deeper thirst for honour than any other people in the world, were the more alert to its perils. The sweeter it tasted, the greater the risk of intoxication. The limit of a magistracy was set at a year, but of a triumph at one or two days. The procession ended, the feast consumed, the trophies hung in the temples of the gods, all that was left behind was litter in the streets. For the Romans, the truest monuments to glory were fashioned not of marble but of memories. Spectacle, if it were not to be an insufferable affront to civic values, had to be fleeting, ephemeral, just like the authority of the magistrate who sponsored it. Forbidden great architecture, the Romans made an art form out of festival instead.

Never did their city appear more like the capital of an empire than when its shabbiness was transformed into a realm of fantasy. Whole theatres might be raised, adorned with marble columns, their floors made of glass or gilded floorboards, filled with bronze statues and dazzling trompe l’oeils – and yet the theatres themselves were merely sets. Thrown up to stage a festival, they would be torn down brutally the moment it had finished. Only once, back in 154, had the censors licensed the construction of a permanent theatre, but even as it was nearing completion, prominent at the base of the Palatine, opinion in the Senate had hardened against it and it had been dismantled, block by block. The result, still apparent nearly a century later, was a powerful incongruity: Rome, mistress of the world, lacked what even the most provincial towns in Italy possessed: a theatre built of stone.

To many citizens, this remained a source of pride, an emphatic demonstration of republican virtue and a guarantee of that ‘peculiar manliness which has always distinguished the Roman people’.¹ To others, it was an embarrassment. Pompey, for instance, swaggering his way around the East, had resented being upstaged by the splendours of Greek architecture, regarding it as an affront to his own prestige and that of Rome. Having looted everything from wine-coolers to balsam trees for his triumph, he had rounded off his pilfering by having sketches drawn of the great theatre of Mitylene, planning to build a copy of it, ‘only larger and more magnificent’.² Even as the debris from his triumph was being swept up, Pompey’s labourers were moving in on the Campus Martius. Flat, empty and close to the Forum, nothing more tempting to a developer could have been imagined – and Pompey had never been good at resisting temptation. The monumentalism of his plans was obvious from the start. He claimed, disingenuously, that he was building a temple to Venus and that the seats were designed as steps leading upwards to the shrine, but nobody was fooled. Once again, as had happened throughout Pompey’s career, precedent was being trampled with cavalier abandon. Not that Pompey himself was remotely bothered. The money being spent was his own, after all. What else should he spend his fortune on if not a gift to the Roman people?

Most of the Roman people, unsurprisingly, agreed. But while Pompey’s admirers thrilled to the gargantuan scale of their hero’s generosity, his peers in the Senate did not. There, particularly in its upper reaches, suspicion was deepening to the point of paranoia. It was noted that the foundations of the new theatre stretched almost to the Ovile. The completed complex would tower above the voting pens. Elections would be held literally in Pompey’s shadow. The Republic itself seemed in danger. This was the cry that had always united the aristocracy against over-reachers, and so it did again now. Catulus, long the leading critic of Pompey’s unconstitutional career, had died shortly after Clodius’ trial, perhaps driven into his grave by the result, but Cato remained unbending as the champion of tradition, and he was more than ready to take on Pompey. In association with the inveterately envious Crassus he constructed an unshiftable bloc of opposition to Pompey’s interests, reducing the great general, in the midst of all his glory, to a sudden, startled impotence. The Senate refused to ratify his settlement of the East. His veterans were denied the farms they had been promised. Even his victory over Mithridates was sneered at by Cato as ‘a war against women’.³

Pompey reacted with hurt and perplexity. Had he not conquered 324 different nations? Had he not doubled the size of Rome’s empire? Why did the Senate refuse to give him his due? Illegal in his methods he may have been, but in his aims he was the very model of convention. Far from aiming at a monarchy, as his enemies darkly hinted, Pompey longed for nothing more than to be accepted into the bosom of the establishment. He had his own insecurities. His family was not an ancient one. The prestige of a man such as Cato, whose achievements were a fraction of his own, gnawed at him, and inspired in him an envious respect. Even when his own reputation had been at its highest, on his return from the East in 62 BC, Pompey had demonstrated an almost puppyish desire to know that Cato respected him in turn. He had gone so far as to divorce his wife, despite the fact that she was the sister of his close ally, Metellus Celer, and announced that he and his son would marry Cato’s two nieces. Naturally, since he was now Rome’s most eligible bachelor, Pompey had assumed that Cato was bound to give his permission. So too had the prospective brides, but no sooner had the two girls excitedly started making their wedding plans than their uncle had told them to save their breath. Cries of joy had turned to tears. Not a woman in the household had failed to take their side. Cato, however, was hardly the man to be swayed by tantrums. ‘Pompey should know’, he pronounced dismissively, ‘that I will not be outflanked via the bedroom of a girl.’⁴ The embarrassed suitor was left looking sleazy and underhand, with nothing to show for the affair save the enmity of the insulted Metellus. Once again Cato’s unerring eye for the moral high ground had enabled him to seize the tactical heights as well. Pompey, floundering ever more badly in unfamiliar terrain, began to be worn down by his enemy’s constant sniping. By the spring of 60 he seemed almost to have given up the battle. The great man did nothing all day, Cicero confided to Atticus, except sit in wistful silence, ‘and gaze at the toga which he wore in his triumph’.⁵

Whatever the satisfaction that Cato took in such reports, however, he remained on his guard. Even amid the wreckage of his political fortunes Pompey remained a formidable foe. It was clear to everyone that if he wanted to break the logjam that Cato and Crassus had so skilfully constructed, then he would need an ally in the consulship, and not just any ally, but a heavyweight capable of facing down Cato. There was one obvious candidate for this role, but in the spring of 60 he was far away, in Spain.

Caesar, to most people’s surprise, had been making a great success of his spell as governor. The loose-belted dandy had proved a natural general. A dashing little war in what is now northern Portugal had not only enabled him to recoup many of his debts, but had led the Senate to award him a triumph. Even these successes, however, paled in comparison to the news of Pompey’s deepening predicament. Caesar could recognise the chance of a lifetime when he saw it. To seize it, however, he would have to hurry. Candidates for the consulship had to declare themselves in Rome by the start of July. Abandoning his province before his successor had even arrived, and travelling at his customary breakneck pace, Caesar made it to the Campus just in time. There, however, amid the clamour and dust of Pompey’s building work, he had to halt. Until he had celebrated his triumph he remained officially under arms, and therefore forbidden to enter Rome. Caesar installed himself in the Villa Publica, then hurriedly applied for the right to stand for the consulship by proxy – a request that the Senate, with a day to spare, appeared perfectly content to grant.

Cato, however, was not. Knowing that a vote would have to be taken before sunset, he rose to his feet and spoke long into the night. A furious Caesar found himself having to choose between his triumph and the consulship. He can hardly have hesitated. Unlike Pompey, he had never had any problem in distinguishing the substance from the shadow of power. He entered Rome and a race that he knew was his to win.

Cato and his allies knew it too. In their battle with Pompey this was a sudden and alarming twist. The fact that Caesar could rely not only on Pompey’s backing but on his own immense popularity served to make him doubly a threat. Having failed to block his old enemy’s entrance into the race, Cato now moved hurriedly to neutralise the effects of his anticipated victory. The most urgent requirement was to ensure the election of a sound second consul, one who could be relied upon to counteract Caesar’s measures. Money from Pompey’s limitless fortune was already flooding the electorate: it was obvious that he would be spending whatever it took to buy up both consulships. Cato’s chosen candidate was his son-in-law, an earnest and somewhat plodding senator by the name of Marcus Bibulus, who suddenly, to his delight, found himself cast as the saviour of the Republic. The full weight of Pompey’s enemies swung behind him. So grave did the situation appear to Cato that he was even prepared to turn a blind eye when Bibulus, going head to head with Pompey’s agents, began to hand out bribes himself.

The money proved to have been well spent. In the elections Caesar came first in a landslide, but Bibulus scraped into second place. So far so good for Cato – but now that he had countered Pompey’s manoeuvrings he also had to block Caesar’s own ambitions. The military talents of the consul-elect had been widely noted. To Cato, the prospect of allowing such a glory-hunter anywhere near another province was intolerable. But how to stop him? Every consul, once he had completed his term of office, was appointed to a governorship as a matter of course. But why, Cato began pointing out, when there was so much unrest near to home, should the consuls of 59 be dispatched to the empire’s outer reaches? After all, more than a decade after Spartacus’ defeat, Italy remained infested with bandits and runaway slaves. Why not, just for one year, make the consuls responsible for their extermination? The Senate was persuaded. The proposal became law. Rather than a province, Caesar could now look forward to policing Italian sheepfolds.

Austere though he was, Cato was evidently not without a sense of humour. It was a dangerous move, of course, to make a man such as Caesar into the butt of a joke, but Cato, by doing so, was priming a trap. If Caesar refused to accept the Senate’s decision, then he would have to rely on force to reverse it; he would be branded a criminal, a second Catiline; Pompey’s name too would be besmirched by association, and his programme stymied for good. Cato’s strategy had always been to identify himself with the constitution and corner his enemies into playing the role of wreckers. Ruthless and bold as Caesar was, how far would he dare to go? Any violent extremes would be met by a formidable coalition. At Caesar’s elbow his fellow consul promised him unwearying opposition: Bibulus had spent a lifetime being overshadowed by his glamorous rival and loathed him accordingly. In the Senate Cato’s allies formed a strong and cohesive majority. Crassus, with his powerful bloc, could surely be relied upon as well: if there was one constant in the world of Roman politics it was that Crassus would be on the opposite side of everything to Pompey. Perilous as the contest promised to be, Cato could feel grimly confident of victory. As he had to be – for he had chosen to use the Republic, and its very stability, as his stake.

From the start, then, crisis menaced the fateful year of Caesar’s consulship. The mood of the Senate as it assembled to hear the new consul for the first time was jittery, mistrustful. Caesar, surpassingly gracious, sought to charm his audience, but Cato, obdurate as ever, refused to be charmed. When Caesar presented a moderate and carefully reasoned bill for the settlement of Pompey’s veterans up he rose in kneejerk opposition. On and on he talked, repeating his favourite tactic, until Caesar cut it short by giving the nod to his lictors. As Cato was led away, the seats of the Senate House began to empty. Caesar demanded to know why the senators were leaving. ‘Because I’d rather be with Cato in prison’, one of them spat back, ‘than in the Senate House with you.’⁶ Caesar, hiding his fury, was forced to back down. Cato was released. Eyeball to eyeball the two men had gone – and Caesar had blinked.

Or so it appeared. In fact, it soon became clear that Caesar’s retreat had been merely tactical. Abandoning the Senate House altogether, he took the campaign for his land bill directly into the Forum. As he did so, Rome began to fill with Pompey’s veterans. Caesar’s enemies found themselves increasingly disconcerted by this menacing backdrop. So flustered did Bibulus become that he committed the supreme gaffe of telling the voters that he cared nothing for their opinion. Cato, watching, must have buried his face in his hands. All the same, he still believed that Caesar was bluffing. It was true that a bill passed by the people would have the full force of the law, but even so, to go against the stated wishes of the Senate was the tactic of a gangster. If Caesar persisted with it, then his credit among his colleagues would be destroyed and his career would be over. Surely no one could be so criminal as to court such a fate.

Caesar’s game plan, however, was soon to become all too clear. In the run-up to the vote on the bill he paraded his celebrity supporters. Few could have been surprised when Pompey stepped forward to argue in favour of the settlement of his veterans, but the identity of the second speaker came as a thunderbolt. Throughout a career of slipperiness and opportunism, Crassus had remained constant to a single principle: opposition to Pompey’s goals. Even that, it now appeared, had been a principle too far. Crassus justified his U-turn as the action of a statesman, performed in the interests of the Republic – but everyone knew that he had never made a selfless move in his life. In his cold and calculating soul not even the pleasure of hatred, it appeared, could compete with the passion for power. The pre-eminence that he had never quite been able to obtain on his own was now within his grasp. Cato, outflanked, found all his defences being turned. It quickly began to dawn on him that, while Pompey and Caesar on their own might have been withstood, the addition of Crassus to their alliance made his enemies the effective masters of Rome. The three men would be able to carve up the Republic as they pleased, ruling as a troika, a ‘triumvirate’. No wonder that Caesar had appeared so blithely self-assured.

Cato and Bibulus threw themselves into a desperate rearguard action to halt the passage of the land bill. On the day of the public vote Bibulus appeared in the Forum to announce that he had observed unfavourable omens in the sky, and that the vote would therefore have to be suspended. The response of the pontifex maximus to this news was to have a bucket of dung emptied over Bibulus’ head. No sooner had the hapless consul begun wiping the excrement from his eyes than he found that a bodyguard formed of Pompey’s veterans was beating up his lictors and smashing his fasces. Amid a chorus of jeers, Bibulus and Cato were then bundled from the Forum, after which the vote was taken and the land bill duly passed. To perform the lucrative task of administering it, a commission was established, headed by – who else? – Pompey and Crassus. Finally, to set the seal on his victory, Caesar demanded that the Senate swear to obey the new law. Intimidated and disoriented, his opponents meekly complied. Only two men held out. One of these was Metellus Celer, by now dangerously ill, but still with sufficient strength to continue his defiance of the man who had so grievously insulted his sister. The other, inevitably, was Cato. Both were finally persuaded to give way by Cicero, who pointed out that their exile would hardly serve to help their cause: ‘You may not need Rome, but Rome will need you.’⁷

Yet even as Cato braced himself to carry on the fight he could not help but reflect with bitterness on his own role in the crisis. By pushing Caesar and Pompey to the extremes, and failing to anticipate the full depths of Crassus’ cynicism, he had done much to precipitate the coup. ‘The three-headed monster’⁸ had been smoked out into the open, and now that it no longer had to keep to the shadows it was able to scavenge unfettered. Pompey had his settlement of the East ratified, Crassus toyed profitably with the tax laws, while Caesar scouted around for a proconsular command. He settled on the governorship of two provinces, Illyricum in the Balkans and, directly on the northern frontier of Italy itself, Gallia Togata, ‘Toga-Wearing Gaul’. The only consolation for senators concerned at the thought of Caesar being awarded three legions virtually on Rome’s doorstep was the fact that neither of his two provinces offered much scope for flamboyant conquests. Then suddenly, in the spring, Metellus Celer succumbed to his illness and Caesar was given the opportunity to lay his hands on a third province – for Metellus’ death had not only removed a thorn from Pompey’s side, but left Transalpine Gaul, on the far side of the Alps, without a governor. This was a province temptingly menaced by any number of barbarians, and Caesar snaffled it up eagerly. The term of his command, for all three provinces, was set at a stupefying five years. The new proconsul was promised a rich feast of glory indeed.

For Cato, this represented an especially bitter defeat. The shattered fragments of his coalition were powerless to oppose it. When hatred for Pompey tempted Lucullus out of retirement one last time he was treated with such dismissive hostility by Caesar that he broke down and begged for mercy on his knees. That so great and haughty a man should have abased himself was shocking to everyone: perhaps, in the tears he shed before Caesar, there was an early symptom of the senile dementia that would progressively destroy him until his death two years later. If so, then the darkening of Lucullus’ mind would have seemed to Cato a grim portent of the enfeeblement of the Republic. It was a sickness to which he was determined he would not succumb himself.

No true citizen could endure to be a slave. This was a truth written in the blood of Rome’s history. After the bucket of excrement had been poured over his head, Bibulus had turned to his fellow consul, loosed the folds of his shit-bespattered toga, and bared his throat. Caesar, amused, had ducked the invitation to cut it – but, for all the melodrama of Bibulus’ gesture, it had served to restore to him his honour. Cato and his allies had no qualms about offering themselves for martyrdom. The consul immured himself in his house, playing the refusenik to great effect for the remainder of the year, while Cato took the challenge directly into the Forum, daring his enemies to do their worst. Both men courted intimidation and violence. Not only did they succeed in casting a shadow of illegality over Caesar’s legislation, but they ruined the image of the triumvirate behind it. No more telling blow in the propaganda war could have been struck. Caesar, for the sake of his career, had been prepared to play fast and loose with the constitution, but neither Pompey nor Crassus wished to be regarded as a rapist of the Republic. As far as they were concerned, they were playing by the rules: that complex, unwritten skein of precedents that bound every player in the political game. The powerful had been joining together in syndicates since the earliest days of the Republic. So it was, for instance, that when Caesar wished to solidify his alliance with Pompey he did so in the most traditional manner possible: by giving him the hand of his daughter. Cato, however, with the moral authority of a man who had refused to take a similar step, immediately denounced him as a pimp. Insults such as this drew blood. Although Crassus, Macavity-like as ever, evaded much of the abuse, Caesar and Pompey both grew steadily more reviled. They kept their grip on the reins of power, but that, for a Roman aristocrat, was never enough. He also had to be respected, honoured, loved.

For Pompey, unpopularity was especially hard to bear. The man who had spent a lifetime basking in the adoration of his fans now found himself ‘physically twisted’ by the loss of his prestige, ‘moping miserably, racked with indecision’. So pathetic was the sight that Cicero told Atticus he believed that ‘only Crassus could enjoy it’.⁹ Naturally, the smirking of his old enemy did nothing to improve Pompey’s mood. The alliance between the two men came increasingly under strain. Neither Crassus, scanning around for fresh carcasses to pick at, nor Pompey, morose with resentment and self-pity, felt any loyalty to the other. Within months of the emergence of the three-headed monster, two of the three heads were snapping viciously at each other. Cato, observing the spectacle with stern satisfaction, could begin to hope that the Republic might be saved after all.

True, there remained the menace of the third head. Caesar had Gaul waiting for him. A war there, which he was almost bound to start, would provide him with an unparalleled opportunity to rebuild his reputation. All the same, Cato’s tactics had inflicted permanent damage on Caesar too. He would leave behind him in Rome a legacy of hatred and fear. No matter how much glory he won in Gaul, and no matter how much gold, a hard core of opponents would continue to regard him as a criminal. For as long as Caesar remained a proconsul he was safe from prosecution – but he could not remain in Gaul for ever. The five years would pass, and at the end of them Cato would be waiting, ready to move. Justice demanded it, as did the needs of his country. If Caesar were not destroyed, then force would be seen to have triumphed over law. A republic ruled by violence would barely be a republic at all.

Clodius Raises the Stakes

The winter festival of the crossroads, the Compitalia, had always been an excuse for riotous celebrations. To the poor, crammed into the maze of back alleys that snarled off every shopping street in Rome, the opportunity to band together, to honour the gods who protected their neighbourhood, was a precious one. But to the rich, it spelled trouble. The Senate, impatient with anything that appeared to challenge its authority, had spent the sixties BC legislating the Compitalia virtually out of existence. The local trade associations, the collegia, which had traditionally organised street parties during the festival, had been the particular focus of senatorial suspicion. In 64 they had been banned altogether. The festival itself had been left to wither and die.

By 59, the Compitalia had become so drained of menace that Cicero could regard it as nothing more than a pleasant backdrop to a stroll. His old friend Atticus was over from Greece, and in January, to celebrate the festival, Cicero suggested that they tour the city’s crossroads together. The two men had much to discuss. It was the first month of Caesar’s consulship. A few weeks previously Cicero had been approached by an agent of the triumvirate. Would he be interested, the agent had asked, in joining forces with Caesar, Pompey and Crassus? Cicero had failed to appreciate this offer for what it was, a chance to rule Rome – but even had he done so, he would surely still have turned it down. He was the conqueror of Catiline, after all. How could he possibly take part in a conspiracy against the Republic? The rule of law was precious to him – even more precious than his personal safety. Cicero, who was not a fearless man by nature, knew that his decision had left him dangerously exposed. Just think, he told Atticus wistfully, what he had turned his back on: ‘reconciliation with my enemies, peace with the great unwashed, a leisured old age’.¹⁰

All the same, his nerves cannot have been too badly on edge, else he would never have suggested a tour of the crossroads. It had been in the cramped maze of Rome’s alleyways that Catiline had sought to foster revolution, and three years after his death the spectres of debt and hunger still stalked the festering streets. As Cicero and Atticus negotiated their way through the filth they could hardly have failed to notice the signs of want. The aristocracy was not entirely oblivious to the sufferings of the poor. Cicero himself, when it suited him, might make eloquent common cause with what he privately disparaged as the ‘mob’. Others went well beyond words. The senator responsible for doubling the distribution of subsidised grain in Rome had been none other than that pillar of the establishment Marcus Cato. Of course, even while promoting welfare, he had made sure to appear as stern and rectitudinous as ever. He did not, as Caesar did, seduce his fellow citizens, make them feel loved. Differences between politicians were a matter less of policy than of image. It would have been as insulting for Cato to be labelled a demagogue as for a matron to be confused with a whore.

This was why crossroads, which were notoriously the haunt of both rabble-rousers and prostitutes, were rarely frequented by the respectable; they were good for the occasional day out, perhaps, but nothing more than that. An association with crossroads could be grievously damaging to a citizen’s good name – or to his wife’s. Clodia Metelli, for instance, had found herself stuck with the mortifying nickname of ‘Lady Copper-Bit’,¹¹ after the low-rent hookers who plied their trade on street corners. One spurned lover described her as selling herself ‘on crossroads and back-alleys’,¹² while another sent her a purse filled with copper coins. Clodia was susceptible to these slanders because of her reputation for promiscuity and her raffish sense of fashion, but slang was not the limit of her taste for gangster chic. Disrespect was invariably punished. Humiliations were answered in kind. The humorist responsible for the gift of coppers had soon had the smile wiped off his face. Publicly beaten and gang-raped, it was he who had been used like a whore.

On no one did Clodia’s glamorous blend of style and violence have a more profound influence than her younger brother. What would have been fatal to the career of a conventional politician was grasped by Clodius as a potential lifeline. He badly needed one. Acquitted of impiety he might have been, but his prospects had been severely damaged by the exposés of his trial. For a member of the Republic’s most arrogant family, the discovery of how little support he commanded from his own class had been a wounding humiliation. As Lucullus could vouch, Clodius was as sensitive to personal affronts as he was imaginative in finding ways to avenge them. Cold-shouldered by the Senate, he began to play up to the slums. The poor, like every other class of Roman, were easily dazzled by snob appeal, and Clodius had both star quality and the popular touch to excess: a man capable of provoking a mutiny in defence of his wounded honour was clearly a demagogue of genius. Even so, Clodius would need to be elected tribune before he could hope to marshal the mob – and therein lay a problem. How could a man who was patrician to his fingertips hold an office reserved exclusively for plebeians? Only by becoming a plebeian himself – a move so unorthodox that it would require a public vote to secure his adoption into a plebeian family, which in turn would need to be sanctioned by a consul. This, in 59, effectively meant Caesar, a man well aware of Clodius’ talent for making trouble. The time might come when the triumvirate would find a use for his antics; but in the meanwhile Caesar was content to leave the would-be tribune to stew.

All of which Atticus, a fixture at Clodia’s dinner parties and therefore privy to Claudian gossip, was well placed to pass on to his friend. Cicero duly breathed a deep sigh of relief. Yet even with Clodius muzzled he found that the past kept on slipping its leash. One particular embarrassment was his former colleague as consul, Antonius Hybrida. After a corrupt and inept spell as governor of Macedon, the Catilinarian turncoat had just resurfaced in Rome. Also back in town, eager to make a mark, and to obscure his own involvement with Catiline, was the precocious Marcus Caelius. On both counts Hybrida presented him with an irresistible target. In April 59 Caelius brought a prosecution. He savaged the defendant in a brilliantly witty speech, portraying him as a disgrace to the Republic, whose twin policies as governor had been to grope slave-girls and spend his whole time drunk. But Cicero, for the defence, failed to enjoy his protégé’s jokes. He had no fondness for Hybrida, but knew that the conviction of his former colleague, the man whose army had brought about Catiline’s final demise, would have ominous implications for himself. His rushed execution of the conspirators had not been forgotten, nor, by many, forgiven. When Hybrida was duly convicted the slums erupted in cheering. Bunches of flowers appeared on Catiline’s grave.

For Cicero, the disaster of Hybrida’s conviction was compounded by a fatal miscalculation. During the trial, in the course of a bad-tempered speech, he had dared to attack the members of the triumvirate by name. Caesar, aggravated by this buzzing of dissent, promptly moved to silence it. The means was ready to hand. Within hours of the speech having been given, Clodius had been declared a plebeian. Cicero, panicking, bolted from Rome. Hunkered down in a villa on the coast, he bombarded Atticus with frantic letters, begging him to milk Clodia for news of her brother’s intentions. Then, towards the end of the month, venturing out on to the Appian Way, he ran into a friend coming from Rome who confirmed for him that, yes, Clodius was indeed standing for election to the tribunate. But if that were the bad news, then there was also some good. Clodius, it appeared, mercurial as ever, had already turned on Caesar. This immediately set Cicero to building castles in the air. Perhaps his two enemies, consul and prospective tribune, might end up destroying each other? A week later and Cicero was cheerleading for Clodius. ‘Publius is our only hope,’ he confided to Atticus. ‘So yes, let him become a tribune, please, yes!’¹³

Even by Cicero’s standards this was a startling turnaround. Yet in a city seething with machinations no feud could ever be reckoned eternal. Nothing better illustrated this than the identity of the friend who had met Cicero on the Appian Way. Curio, Clodius’ closest political ally, was every bit as unprincipled and volatile as his friend. Since orchestrating the intimidation of Cicero at Clodius’ trial he had continued to blot his reputation with scandal. His relationship with Hybrida’s nephew, a rugged, handsome young man by the name of Mark Antony, had become the talk of Rome. Even by the standards of the time the scale of their debts was regarded as shocking. It was whispered that Antony, despite his bull-neck and muscle-bound body, dressed as a woman to play the role of Curio’s wife. When the two men had been banned from seeing each other Curio had smuggled his friend in through his father’s roof – or so the scandal-rakers claimed.* Then, in the year of Caesar’s consulship, gossip and disapproval had abruptly turned to praise. Curio, far too arrogant to cringe before anyone, raised the morale of the entire Senate by his flamboyant defiance of Caesar. There was no more talk of him now as ‘Curio’s little daughter’. Instead, his recklessness was hailed as the courage of a patriot. Respectable senators saluted him in the Forum. The circus greeted him with rapturous acclaim.

These were marks of honour that any citizen might desire. In the shadow cast by the triumvirate Curio’s defiance illumined the Republic. It was certainly no idle fantasy for Cicero to hope that Clodius might be tempted to share in his friend’s glory. Yet fantasy it was soon to prove. Clodius had recognised, far more cynically and penetratingly than anyone else, the full scale of the opportunities presented by the crisis. For the moment at least the mould of the Republic had been shattered. Clodius, who rarely came across an orthodoxy without flaunting his contempt for it, was perfectly suited to this new climate of lawlessness. Rather than take a stand against the triumvirate, he prepared not merely to emulate their methods but to push them to new extremes. After all, with a conventional political career closed off to him, he had nothing to lose. Clodius was not interested in the bleating praise of men like Cicero. What he wanted, like any member of his arrogant, high-reaching family, was power. Win that and the marks of honour would surely follow soon enough.

His plan was simple: seduce the mob and seize control of the streets. So criminal, so outrageous was this policy that in more settled times surely not even Clodius would have dared conceive it. With the events of Caesar’s consulship, however, the fatal toxin of violence had been reintroduced to the Republic, and its poison was spreading fast. The triumvirate wished to maintain its stranglehold; the conservatives in the Senate wished to break free; both sides needed an ally prepared to dirty his hands. Clodius, promoting himself as just such a man, began alternately to woo and menace the two sides. ‘Selling himself now to this client,’ Cicero sneered, ‘now to that’¹⁴ – a whore, just like his sister. But Clodius’ capriciousness disguised a savage sense of focus. In his ambitions, if not his loyalties, he was utterly constant. He wished to prove himself worthy of his family name. And in addition, of course, he wished to see Cicero destroyed.

In December Clodius took up his tribunate. He had prepared for the moment with great care. A raft of legislation was immediately laid before the people. The bills were crowd-pleasers all. Most blatantly eye-catching was a proposal to replace the subsidised grain supplies established by Cato with a free monthly dole. The slums duly seethed with gratitude, but Clodius had no illusions that this counted for much in itself. Of all the many treacherous foundations upon which a nobleman might build a career, none was more shifting than the affections of the poor: just as discipline made an army, so the lack of it made a mob. But what if a way could be found to mobilise the slums? This was the question that Clodius, surreptitiously, had introduced in the form of an innocuous-sounding second bill. He proposed that the Compitalia be restored to its full glory; the collegia too. All across the vast sprawl of Rome, wherever there were crossroads, the banned clubs would be reformed. Clodius, with his gangster swagger, had always cut a dash as their patron. Now, if the law could only be passed, they would be bound to him for ever. Wherever there was a crossroads he would have a private gang.

This was a potentially massive innovation. Indeed, so massive an innovation was it that the Senate entirely failed to recognise it as such. The idea that a nobleman and the poor might have intimate bonds of obligation was entirely alien to the Roman mind, nor could anyone even conceive what the consequences might be. As a result, Clodius found it easy to force through the measure. He dealt with what limited opposition there was contemptuously, by twisting arms and greasing palms. Even Cicero was bought off. Using Atticus as a go-between, Clodius promised not to prosecute him over the executions of the conspirators, and Cicero, after much havering, agreed in return not to attack his enemy’s bills. In early January 58 the legislation was passed. On the same day Clodius and his heavies occupied the temple of Castor, a convenient stone’s throw away from the centre of the Forum. Here was where the collegia were to be organised. The space around the temple began to fill with tradesmen and artisans from the crossroads, chanting Clodius’ name and jeering at his opponents. The steps to the temple itself were demolished, leaving the podium as a fortress. The collegia were restructured on paramilitary lines. The threat of violence grew ever more palpable in the air. Then, suddenly, the storm broke. When one of Caesar’s lieutenants was arraigned for prosecution and appealed to the tribune for help, Clodius’ gangs piled in, mugging the judge where he sat and smashing up the court. The trial itself was permanently abandoned. As an exercise in controlled thuggery, its success appears to have exceeded the expectations of even Clodius himself.

It certainly prostrated Cicero. Not only had his deadliest enemy revealed an alarming talent for organised violence, but he had also publicly aligned himself with the interests of Caesar. Since the end of his consulship, the new governor of Gaul had been lurking beyond the city’s boundary, keeping track of events in Rome. Now he watched on in studied silence as Clodius prepared for his revenge. Trampling on the spirit, if not the letter, of his agreement with Cicero, the tribune brought forward yet another bill. Dressed up as a statement of stern republican principle, it proposed that any citizen guilty of putting another to death without trial should be sent into exile. There was no need to mention names. Everyone knew its target. With this deft push, Cicero was sent slithering and slipping towards the brink.

Scrabbling desperately to haul himself back, he grew his hair, put on mourning and toured the streets. Clodius’ gangs dogged him, hurling abuse, stones and shit. Hortensius, trying to rally to his old rival’s support, was cornered and almost lynched. Wherever Cicero looked, he found the escape routes blocked. The consuls, respectable senators who would normally have stood up for him, had been bribed with lucrative provincial commands. The Senate was cowed. Caesar, when Cicero brought himself to grovel in the proconsul’s tent, was apologetic, but shrugged his shoulders and said that there was nothing he could do. Perhaps, he suggested silkily, Cicero might care to reconsider his opposition to the triumvirate and take a post on the governor’s staff in Gaul? No matter how desperate Cicero’s plight, that would have been a humiliation too far. Even exile was preferable to abject dishonour. Briefly, Cicero thought of fighting back, of organising street gangs of his own, but he was dissuaded by his friends. It was Hortensius, still covered in scars and bruises, who advised him to cut his losses and go. Stunned by the scale and suddenness of the catastrophe, taunted by the jeering from the pickets outside his house, contemplating the ruin of a lifetime’s achievement, Cicero numbly prepared for his departure. Only in the dead of night did he at last dare steal out from his house. Travelling on foot to avoid attention from Clodius’ gangs, he slunk through the streets towards the city gates. By dawn he was safely on the Appian Way. Behind him, as the morning hearth fires began to be lit, Rome shimmered and then vanished beneath a haze of brown smoke.

As the news began to spread through the waking city, Clodius was as stunned as everyone else. In an ecstasy of triumphalism his mobs surged up the Palatine and occupied Cicero’s house. The wretched exile’s mansion, his pride and joy, the most visible and public mark of his rank, was trashed. Then the demolition men moved in. Watched by a packed Forum, the house was torn to pieces, block by block, while next to it, casting the rubble in its imposing shadow, Clodius’ mansion stood proud and inviolate. Just in case this act of vengeance was mistaken for mob violence, rather than the justified punishment of an enemy of the people, the tribune rushed through yet another bill, formally condemning Cicero by name. On the building site where the criminal’s mansion had once stood, a temple to Liberty was raised. The remaining land was annexed by Clodius himself. All was transcribed on to a tablet of bronze, which the tribune, stern-faced, then carried to the Capitol and placed on public display. Here they were to stay for eternity, testifying to his glory, and to Cicero’s crimes.

No wonder that the struggle for pre-eminence in the Republic was growing so savage, when the rewards could be so sweet.

Caesar’s Winning Streak

As Cicero dragged himself disconsolately from Rome, into an exile that would ultimately see him holed up in Macedon, Caesar headed north. Now that the end-game between the great orator and Clodius appeared to have played itself out, the governor of Gaul could no longer afford to linger on in the outskirts of the capital. Throughout the Alps trouble was threatening. German war bands had begun to flood across the Rhine, and waves from the incursions were already lapping against the Roman frontier.

Caesar, travelling as usual at a furious speed, headed directly for the point of maximum pressure. Eight days after leaving Rome he arrived in Geneva. Just beyond Lake Leman a vast and menacing wagon train was parked on the border. The Helvetians, natives of the Alps, had tired of their mountain home and wished to strike out west. The new governor, recognising a golden opportunity when he saw it, played for time. First, he announced to the tribesmen that he would consider their request to pass through Roman territory – then promptly sealed off the border. Five extra legions, two of them recruited from scratch, were force-marched to man it. The Helvetians, finding the frontier blocked, began to skirt its length, their long wagon train lumbering westwards, 360,000 men, women and children on the march. Caesar shadowed them, passing across the frontier and into free Gaul. Taking the Helvetians by surprise, he ambushed their rearguard and then, when the tribesmen attacked Caesar in turn, defeated them a second time in a ferocious battle. The survivors sued for terms. Caesar ordered them back home.

It had been a stunning victory – and thoroughly illegal. The previous year sweeping new measures had come into effect, specifically designed to regulate abuses by provincial governors and restrain their ambitions. Their author had been none other than Caesar himself. Now, by picking a fight with a tribe not subject to the Republic, on territory not ruled by the Republic, he had flagrantly broken his own law. His enemies back in Rome were quick to point this out. In time, Cato would even propose that Caesar be handed over to the tribes he had assaulted. To many in the Senate, the Gallic adventure appeared both unwarranted and unjust.

Not to most citizens, however. One man’s war criminal was another man’s hero. Barbarian migrations had always been the stuff of Roman nightmares. Whenever wagons began rumbling across the north, the reverberations would echo far away in the Forum. The Republic had no fiercer bogeyman than the pale-skinned, horse-maned, towering Gaul. Hannibal might have ridden up to Rome’s gates and flung his javelin over them, but he had never succeeded in capturing the seat of the Republic. Only the Gauls had managed that. Way back, at the beginning of the fourth century BC, a barbarian horde had burst without warning across the Alps, sent a Roman army fleeing from it in panic, and swept into Rome. The Capitol alone had remained sacrosanct, and even that would have fallen had not the sacred geese of Juno alerted the garrison to a surprise attack. When the Gauls, having slaughtered, looted and burned at will, had withdrawn as suddenly as they had come, they had left behind them a city resolved never again to endure such indignities. This was the steel that had enabled Rome to become the mistress of the world.

Even three centuries later, however, memories of the Gauls remained raw. Every year guard-dogs would be crucified, a posthumous punishment of the dogs who had failed to bark on the Capitol, while Juno’s geese, as an ongoing reward for their ancestors’ admonitory honking, were brought to watch the spectacle on cushions of purple and gold. A more practical measure was the setting aside of an emergency fund, to be used only in the event of a second barbarian invasion. Even now that the Republic was a superpower this was regarded as an eminently sensible precaution. When men lived not as citizens but halfway to beasts there could be no knowing when their savagery might not suddenly erupt. Within living memory a nation of giants, three hundred thousand of them, it was reckoned, had appeared suddenly from the wastelands of the north, destroying everything in their way, subhuman monsters from the icy rim of the world. Their men had eaten raw flesh; their women had attacked legionaries with their bare hands. Had Marius, in two brilliant victories, not managed to annihilate the invaders, then Rome, and the world with her, would surely have come to an end.

Scares on this scale were not quickly forgotten. No wonder that most citizens, when they heard the news of the Helvetians’ defeat, cared nothing for the laws that might have been broken to achieve it. After all, what greater duty did a proconsul have than to secure the safety of Rome? Caesar himself scrupulously refuted the charge of glory-hunting. The security of his province, and Italy too, had been at stake. For as long as there were restless tribes beyond the Roman frontier, ignorant of the conventions of civilised behaviour, the danger would persist. By this logic, familiar to generations of Romans, the assault on the Helvetians could be reckoned an act of self-defence. So too Caesar’s ongoing campaign – for having dispatched the Helvetians back to their homeland, to serve as a buffer between the Germans and his province, he had next swung east to attack the Germans themselves. The fact that their king had been given the official title of ‘friend of the Roman people’ cut no ice with Caesar. The Germans were successfully provoked into offering battle, defeated, then driven back across the Rhine. There, in the dark, dripping woods, they were welcome to lurk, but not near Caesar’s province – nor anywhere in Gaul.

Already the two were being elided. That winter of 58–57 BC, rather than withdrawing his legions back into his province, Caesar left them billeted a hundred miles north of the frontier, deep in the territory of a supposedly independent tribe. Once again, an illegal measure was justified by the proconsul as an act of forward defence. This was an argument that may have satisfied public opinion back in Rome, but it did nothing to ease a mounting sense of outrage in Gaul itself. The full implications of Caesar’s new policy were by now starting to hit home. What precisely would satisfy the Romans’ desire for a defensible frontier? If the Rhine to the east, then why not the Channel to the north, or the Atlantic coast to the west? Across frozen forests and fields, from village to village, from chieftain’s hall to chieftain’s hall, the same rumour was borne: the Romans were aiming ‘to pacify all Gaul’.¹⁵ As warriors burnished their glittering, jewel-wrought shields, and striplings, eager to prove themselves ready for battle, forded ice-sheeted streams with full armour on their backs, so rival tribes sought to patch up their differences. Free Gaul prepared itself for war.

As did Caesar. He was not the man to tolerate anti-Roman agitation. It made no difference whether a tribe had been defeated or was free, the Republic demanded respect, and honour required that a proconsul instil it. Having provoked the Gauls into defiance, Caesar now felt perfectly justified in smashing it. That winter he recruited two more legions. High-handedly, and without any reference to the Senate, he had already doubled the number of troops originally allocated to his province. When winter thawed to spring and Caesar left camp, he had an army of eight legions, some forty thousand men, by his side.

He would need every last one. Heading due north, Caesar was venturing into territory never before penetrated by Roman forces. It was shadow-haunted, sinister, dank with mud and slaughter. Travellers whispered of strange rites of sacrifice, performed in the dead of oaken glades, or by the side of black-watered, bottomless lakes. Sometimes, it was said, the nights would be lit by vast torches of wickerwork, erected in the forms of giants, their limbs and bellies filled with prisoners writhing in an orgy of death. Even at the feasts for which the Gauls were famous, their customs were barbarous and repulsive. The ubiquitous Posidonius, who had travelled through Gaul in the nineties BC, taking notes wherever he went, observed that duels were common over the best cuts of meat, and that even when warriors did get round to feasting they would not lie down to eat, as civilised men did, but would sit and let their straggling moustaches drip with grease and gravy. Blank-eyed spectators of these scenes of gluttony, and a spectacle even more repellent, were the severed heads of the warriors’ enemies, stuck on poles or in niches. So universally were these used as decorations in Gaulish villages that, Posidonius confessed, he had almost grown used to them by the end of his trip.¹⁶

To the legionaries, marching ever further north along pitted, winding tracks, peering nervously through the endless screens of trees, it must have appeared that they were entering a realm of utter darkness. This was why, on their shoulders, they bore stakes as well as spears. The camp they built after every day’s march, always identical, night after night, provided them not only with security against ambushes, but also a reminder of civilisation, of home. In the midst of barbarism, a forum and two straight streets would be laid out. The sentries, peering out into the blackness from behind the palisade, would have the comfort of knowing that behind them, at least, there was a corner of a foreign field that was temporarily Rome.

Yet what appeared impossibly barbarous to the legionaries had already been synthesised and fed through Caesar’s intelligence machine. Their general knew precisely where he was heading – and it was not into the unknown. Caesar may have been the first to lead the legions beyond the frontier, but there had been Italians roaming through the wilds of Gaul for decades. In the second century BC, with the establishment of permanent Roman garrisons in the south of the country, the natives of the province had begun to develop a taste for their conquerors’ vices. One, in particular, had gone straight to their heads: wine. The Gauls, who had never come across the drink before, had not the slightest idea how to handle it. Rather than diluting it with water, as the Romans did, they preferred to down it neat, wallowing in drunken binges, and ‘ending up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad’.¹⁷ Merchants, who found this style of consumption highly lucrative, had begun to foster it as widely as they could, travelling far beyond the limits of the Roman province, until soon enough the whole of Gaul had grown sodden with liquor. Naturally, with a market of alcoholics to exploit, the merchants had begun to inflate their prices. Since their ability to do this depended on the natives not cultivating their own vineyards, the Senate, ever savvy when it came to fleecing foreigners, had made it illegal to sell vines to ‘the tribes beyond the Alps’.¹⁸ By Caesar’s time the exchange rate had stabilised at a jar of wine for one slave, which, at least as far as the Italians were concerned, made for a fabulously profitable import–export business. The slaves could be sold on for a huge mark-up, and the extra manpower available to Roman viticulturists enabled ever more gallons of wine to be produced. It was a virtuous circle that kept everyone – apart from the slaves, of course – happy. The Gauls stayed sozzled, and the merchants grew rich.

Caesar, in daring to imagine that he could impose himself upon a country as vast, warlike and independent as Gaul, was perfectly aware how much he owed to Italian exporters. It was not only that they provided him with spies. The Germans, having witnessed the effect of wine on the Gauls, had gone so far as to ‘ban it from being imported into their own country, because they think it makes men soft’.¹⁹ Quarrelsome too. Wine was more precious to Gallic chieftains than gold. Tribes were endlessly raiding each other for slaves, depopulating the countryside with their razzias, breeding bestial, debilitating rivalries – all of which made them easy prey for a man such as Caesar. Even when his spies reported that a confederation numbering 240,000 had been formed against him, he was unperturbed. This was despite the fact that the tribes in his way belonged to the Belgae, the people who, because ‘they were furthest removed from the civilisation and luxury of the Roman province, and were least often visited by merchants importing the kind of goods which lead to effeminacy’,²⁰ were reckoned the bravest in Gaul. Caesar struck against them hard, with all the steel-armoured efficiency he could bring to bear. The further north he advanced, the more the Belgic alliance fragmented. Tribes who submitted were treated with ostentatious generosity. Those who resisted were wiped out. Caesar’s eagles were duly planted on the coast of the North Sea. At the same time messengers came to him from Publius Crassus, the dashing young son of the triumvir, with news that the legion under his command had received the submission of all the tribes in the west. ‘Peace’, Caesar wrote in triumph, ‘had been brought to the whole of Gaul.’²¹

The news was received ecstatically back in Rome. In 63 Pompey had been granted ten days of public thanksgiving. Now, in 57, Caesar was awarded fifteen. Not even his bitterest enemies could deny the stunning nature of his achievements. After all, nothing that enhanced the prestige of the Republic could be reckoned a crime, and Caesar, by teaching the Gauls to honour its name, had brought into the orbit of Rome people previously lost in the darkness of barbarism. As one of his old opponents gushed in the Senate, ‘regions and nations unreported to us in books, or in first-hand accounts, or even by rumours, have now been penetrated by our general, our army, and the arms of the Roman people’.²² Rejoice indeed!

Yet, for Caesar, there could be no relaxing. Deep and devastating though his incursion had been, a single raid had hardly been sufficient to reduce Gaul to the status of a province. For now, the country was prepared to acknowledge Caesar’s prestige, but supremacy, among a people as inveterately competitive and quarrelsome as the Gauls, was founded on treacherous sands. And so it was too, of course, in Rome. This was why Caesar, even in the damp forests of the north, still had to keep one eye firmly fixed on the political battlefield in the capital. Events in Rome did not stand still just because he was absent. Much had already changed. Nothing better illustrated this than the identity of the man who had stood up in the Senate to propose the thanksgiving for Caesar’s achievements in Gaul. After a bitter exile of eighteen months Cicero had returned to Rome.

Pompey Throws Again

In the dark days before his flight into exile the frantic orator had gone grovelling to Pompey as well as to Caesar. Cicero had long despaired of his idol’s failings, but he had never entirely given up on him. Despite Pompey’s evident complicity in the outrages of Caesar’s consulship, Cicero had continued to hope against hope that all might yet be well, and the great man be won back to the cause of legitimacy. Pompey, for his part, had been flattered to play the role of Cicero’s patron, and had even condescended to warn Clodius against pushing his vendetta too far. There had been a certain pathos in this gesture: at a time when his popularity was in free fall, and he was being booed for the first time in his life, Pompey had found in Cicero’s hero-worship a welcome reminder of the good old days. Desperate to unburden his doubts and frustrations, he had even confessed to the orator that he regretted his role in the triumvirate – a revelation that Cicero, in high excitement, had immediately passed on to all his friends. Inevitably, Caesar had got wind of it – and been confirmed in his view that Cicero would have to go. Pompey, forced to choose between his father-in-law and his trusting friend, had reluctantly acquiesced. As Clodius’ persecution of Cicero reached its violent climax, so he had retired in embarrassment to his country villa. Refusing to take the hint, Cicero had pursued him there. He had been informed by the doorman that no one was at home. Pompey, unable to face an interview with the man he had betrayed, had slipped out through the back.

With Cicero safely gone, the great man was plunged into a renewed bout of brooding. Equivocations did not sit well with his self-image. He was still no nearer to squaring the impossible circle that had tormented him since his return from the East. He wanted the respect and admiration of his peers, and the supreme authority to which he believed his achievements entitled him – but he could not have both. Now, having made his choice, he found that power without love had a bitter taste. Spurned by Rome, Pompey turned for comfort instead to his wife. He had married Caesar’s daughter, Julia, for the chilliest of political motives, but it had not taken him long to grow helplessly smitten with his young bride. Julia, for her part, gave her husband the adoration without which he could not flourish. Surrendering to their mutual passion, the couple began to spend more and more time secluded in a love nest in the country. Pompey’s fellow citizens, unaccustomed as they were to displays of conjugal affection, sniggered in prurient disapproval. Here was true scandal. The public resentment of Pompey began to grow tinged with scorn.

No one was more sensitive to this changing wind of opinion than Clodius. He had a good nose for weakness, and began to wonder whether Pompey, for all the glamour of his reputation and his loyal veterans, might not perhaps be a man of straw – a hunch far too tempting not to be put immediately to the test. Aware that nothing would prove more vexatious to Pompey than a renewed assault on his settlement of the East – the issue which, after all, had forced him into the fateful alliance with Crassus and Caesar in the first place – Clodius went straight for the jugular. Prince Tigranes, the son of the King of Armenia, was still in Rome as a hostage, eight years after his father had handed him over to Pompey as a guarantee of good behaviour. Clodius not only abducted the Prince from under the great man’s nose, but then, to add injury to insult, put him on a boat bound for Armenia. When Pompey tried to seize back his hostage, his supporters were set upon and beaten up. The establishment, far from taking Pompey’s side, relished the spectacle of his impotent rage. This, of course, was precisely what Clodius had been banking on. Even as his gangs were rampaging through the streets, he found himself basking in the glow of the Senate’s approval.

Not that Clodius, given the opportunity to humiliate an enemy, had ever needed much encouragement. As with Cicero, so now with Pompey, he could smell blood. His gangs duly went into a feeding frenzy. Whenever the unhappy Pompey ventured into the Forum he would be greeted with a chorus of jeers. This was no idle matter. One of the most ancient laws of the Republic defined the chanting of abuse as akin to murder. By the light of such tradition Clodius was issuing death-threats, and Pompey was unnerved accordingly. He had never before been the object of such mockery. His passion for his wife provoked particular hilarity. ‘“What’s the name of the sex-mad general?”’ Clodius would yell. ‘“Who touches the side of his head with his finger?” … And after each question, he would make a signal to the mob by shaking out the folds of his toga, and his gangs, like a trained chorus, would scream out the answer in unison: “Pompey!”’²³

‘Who touches the side of his head with his finger?’ For a man given to dressing up as a dancing-girl to accuse Rome’s greatest general of effeminacy took some nerve. This was all the more so because many of his most intimate circle were also embroiled in sex scandals. Mark Antony, moving on from his affair with Curio, had begun sniffing around Clodius’ much-loved wife, Fulvia, a breach of the codes of friendship that would soon see the two men threatening to kill each other. Similar trouble was also brewing over a woman to whom Clodius was even more passionately devoted. Following his triumphant prosecution of Hybrida, Marcus Caelius had celebrated by renting a luxury apartment from Clodius on the Palatine. There he had met Clodia. Witty, handsome and famous for his rhythm, Caelius had proved to be just the widow’s type. The ambitious Caelius had needed no encouragement to take up with a Claudian, and Clodia, with her husband barely cold, was evidently in the mood for consolation. Of course, her idiosyncratic style of mourning could not help but raise eyebrows. The affairs of the great lady remained a topic of abiding interest to Rome’s scandal-rakers, and a favourite theme of abusive sloganeering in the Forum. But no matter what was chanted against him and his sister, Clodius was always able to drown it out. Charges of immorality only provoked him to ever more furious denunciations of his own. The outrageous hypocrisy of it all only added to the fun. And so the abuse of Pompey and his lechery continued.

Of course, Clodius being Clodius, he could not resist seeing just how far the intimidation could be pushed. In August, as Pompey was crossing the Forum to attend a meeting of the Senate, a clattering of metal on stone rang out from the temple of Castor. One of Clodius’ slaves had pointedly dropped a dagger. Pompey, believing his life to be in danger, at once retreated from the Forum and barricaded himself behind his front door. Clodius’ gangs pursued him and set up camp outside. The tribune threatened to do to Pompey what he had already done to Cicero: seize his mansion, level it and build a temple to Liberty in its place. Pompey, unlike Cicero, did not bolt and run, but he found himself blockaded, unable to leave his house – a staggering reversal for the greatest man in the Republic. Again the Senate watched on in smug satisfaction. Crassus, with whom Clodius had been careful to remain on excellent terms, naturally shared in the general smirking. For Clodius himself, it was an intoxicating, scarcely believable moment of triumph. Champion of the aristocracy, patron of the slums, he appeared to be the master of Rome.

But only fleetingly. By testing the opportunities provided by street violence to the very limits, Clodius had blazed a trail that others were already preparing to follow. In December 58 Clodius’ term of office came to an end. Among the new tribunes was a gruff and brutal Pompeian, Titus Annius Milo. Encouraged by his patron, Milo formally indicted Clodius for employing violence, an open-and-shut case if ever there was one. Clodius, by appealing to his brother Appius, who was praetor that year, managed to have the charge suppressed, and ordered his gangs to ransack Milo’s house in revenge. But the new tribune, backed by the infinite resources of Pompey, and aware that he was dead meat unless he met violence with violence, refused to be intimidated. He began to recruit gangs of his own, not, as Clodius had done, by bribing amateurs from the slums, but by importing well-armed, well-trained heavies from Pompey’s estates and buying up gladiators to steel their ranks. At a stroke, Clodius’ monopoly on street violence ended, a challenge to which the former tribune rose with predictable gusto. The gang warfare escalated daily. Soon, it had become so brutal that all government institutions in the Forum, including the law courts, had to be suspended. Day after day, across the public places of Rome, the tides of anarchy ebbed and flowed.

By such desperate measures did Pompey impose himself and his authority back upon a city in which for months he had been kept under virtual house arrest. Yet the Senate, as well as the streets, had to be bent to his will, and Clodius, the arrogant, impossible Clodius, given a taste of his own medicine. The obvious means for achieving that was even then wringing his hands in high-flown misery across the Adriatic. Pompey, having refused to exert himself to save Cicero the year before, now began touring Italy, drumming up support for the exile’s return. Clients in the countryside and provincial towns were ordered to Rome. All through the summer of 57 they flooded into the capital. Meanwhile, Caesar, far away in Gaul, had been persuaded to give his reluctant approval to Cicero’s recall, and a vote in the Senate also backed it, by 416 to 1. The dissenting voice had, inevitably, belonged to Clodius. In August the long-awaited public vote was finally held in the Campus Martius. Clodius, attempting to disrupt it, was seen off with contemptuous ease by Milo, whose gangs stood on guard all day by the Ovile. So confident was Cicero of the result that he had already set sail for Italy as the vote was being held, and he was brought the news of his official recall as he waited in Brundisium. His progress from then on, with Tullia, his adored and much-missed daughter by his side, was like a dream come true. Cheering supporters lined the Appian Way. As he approached Rome the crowds streamed out to greet him. Applause followed him wherever he went. ‘I did not simply return home,’ he observed modestly, ‘but ascended to the sky.’²⁴

But not even Cicero was conceited enough to doubt that the real triumph had been Pompey’s. More than ever, the orator’s old, familiar boasting had a shrillness bred of fear. Every Roman found it an agony to owe another man a favour, and Cicero now owed Pompey and Caesar his career. Hence his gushing in the Senate House. As well as leading the praise for Caesar’s conquests, he found himself proposing that Rome’s entire corn supply be put into Pompey’s hands. The motion was passed, but only once Clodius, with hateful logic, had pointed out to the Senate House its precise implications: Pompey would be able to bribe the starving slums with bread, while Cicero, the self-proclaimed scourge of demagoguery, now stood revealed as its agent. The bare-faced effrontery of these accusations did not make them any less true. Cicero duly spluttered and squirmed.

The exchange in the Senate House had served notice that Clodius felt not remotely chastened by his enemy’s return. When Cicero succeeded in persuading Rome’s priests that his mansion on the Palatine could be restored to him without offence to the goddess Liberty, Clodius resorted to naked terrorism. Cicero’s workmen were driven from the building-site; his brother’s house was set on fire; Cicero himself was assaulted on the via Sacra. At the same time the street fighting between Clodius and Milo reached a new pitch of violence, and the two gang leaders, each openly threatening to murder the other, also attempted to pursue each other through the courts. Once again, Milo indicted Clodius on a charge of using violence, and once again, by pulling strings in the Senate, Clodius wriggled free. In February 56, with a hypocrisy remarkable by even his standards, Clodius brought an identical charge against Milo. Cicero and Pompey, rallying to their man’s cause, prepared to speak in Milo’s defence. The spectacle of his three deadliest enemies lined up against him threw Clodius into a frenzy. As Pompey rose to speak the Forum seethed with catcalls and jeers. Clodius, from the prosecutor’s bench, began cheering on his gangs. As he had done before, he stood and tugged on his toga, giving cues to his supporters as they chanted abuse. Soon they were spitting at Milo’s strongarms, then throwing fists and stones. Milo’s gangs fought back. Clodius himself was dragged off the rostra, and a full-scale battle broke out. Amid the pandemonium, the trial itself was abandoned.

Pompey, shaken and bruised, retired from the Forum pale with fury. He was in no doubt who the mastermind behind the riot had been – and it was not Clodius. For three years Pompey had been in a syndicate with Crassus, and still he was quick to blame his old nemesis for every debacle. On this occasion, however, his suspicions appeared well founded. Ever since autumn 57, and his appointment as Rome’s grain commissar, Pompey had been angling for another Eastern command. So too had Crassus. Until the riot, mutual self-interest had kept their rivalry in the shadows, but Clodius, typically, had ripped aside the veil. ‘Who’s after a trip east?’ he had bellowed to his gangs. ‘Pompey!’ the gangs had thundered back in reply. ‘Who do we all want to go instead?’ The answer had been deafening, and calculated to give Pompey apoplexy: ‘Crassus!’²⁵ A few days later Pompey told Cicero that he blamed his partner in the triumvirate for the riot, for Clodius, for everything. He then confided, just for good measure, that Crassus was plotting to have him killed.

The news spread like wildfire. The triumvirate was finished. That much, at least, seemed clear to everyone. If anyone did express surprise, it was only that the syndicate had lasted so long. After all, as surely as the seasons passed, so too did the grip of great men upon power. In that spring of 56 BC the thaw seemed general throughout the Republic. Old enemies of the triumvirate – Bibulus, Curio – began to stir, stretch their limbs, wake from hibernation. In the Senate the riot in the Forum was officially condemned as ‘contrary to the interests of the Republic’,²⁶ and the responsibility for it pinned not on Clodius but on Pompey. This insult to his honour needled the great man into another vast explosion of temper, and, inevitably, he blamed Crassus. But although this may briefly have served to cheer him up, the evidence of his unpopularity with the entire Senate was now too glaring to be ignored. All his dearest ambitions – to bask in the praise and respect of his peers, to lead a brilliant second command to the East – stood revealed as hopeless fantasies. For Pompey the Great, it appeared, the glory days were over. As his fury subsided he plunged into a massive sulk.

The scent of his failure hung like carrion-perfume over Rome. In the Senate scavengers whined and snarled with excitement. With Pompey wallowing helplessly in the shallows, attention next turned to the prospects for beaching a second big beast. Caesar’s enemies knew that there would never be a better opportunity to finish him off. Three years they had been waiting – and now, at last, one of them moved in for the kill.

Courage came easily to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. In his case it was indistinguishable from an arrogance so pronounced as to verge on stupidity. Obscenely rich, obscenely well bred, he was a man described by Cicero, who was sensitive to such things, as having been born a consul-designate. In that spring of 56, Domitius prepared to claim his birthright. A brother-in-law of Cato, a blood-enemy of Pompey, who had executed Domitius’ brother in the dark days of the civil war, there could be no doubting where his loyalties would lie. In announcing that he would stand for the consulship, he openly declared that, if elected, he would have Caesar’s command declared invalid. As a replacement, naturally, he proposed himself. Transalpine Gaul had been conquered by his grandfather and he regarded it as his by hereditary right. At his back the establishment bayed its approval. First Pompey; now Caesar – surely the over-reachers, the would-be tyrants, were doomed?

Four and a half centuries of the Republic’s history said that they were. Tradition was stronger than any triumvirate. One man slipped, another took his place. This was how it had always been. Let Pompey, Caesar and their successors be eclipsed. Whatever happened, the Republic would endure.

Or so everyone assumed.

THE WINGS Of ICARUS

Crassus Loses his Head

As the triumvirate splintered, others, lower down the food chain, were engaged in desperate struggles of their own. At the beginning of April, Marcus Caelius was brought to trial. His colourful past did not bear close scrutiny. Certainly, the prosecution had no problem in alleging a vast range of vices and crimes, including – most shockingly of all – an assault on a deputation of ambassadors and the murder of its leader. What gave the trial its whiff of scandal, however, was a further charge: that Caelius had attempted to poison his lover, Clodia Metelli. Clearly the relationship had not been going well.

Not that the prosecutors ever even alluded to it. Because the details of the affair promised to be as damaging to Caelius as to Clodia, they had calculated that the defence team would be equally as discreet. But they had reckoned without Cicero. Relations with his old pupil had long been rocky, but the opportunity to launch a full-frontal assault on Clodia had been too good to miss. Rather than draw a veil over the affair, Cicero instead chose to make it the focus of his entire defence. ‘Suppose a woman who has lost her husband throws her house open to every man who needs sexual release, and publicly lives the life of a prostitute, suppose she thinks nothing of going to parties given by total strangers, suppose she carries on like this in Rome, in her pleasure-gardens, and among the orgy-set at Baiae,’ he thundered, ‘then do you really think it would be scandalous and disgraceful for a young man such as Caelius to have picked her up?’¹ Of course not! After all, she was only a streetwalker, and therefore fair game! The jurors, listening to Rome’s queen of chic being eviscerated in this manner, were titillated and appalled. What they failed to notice was that Cicero, by going after his enemy’s sister, had obscured all the really serious charges against his client beneath a froth of innuendo. The strategy proved to be gratifyingly successful: Caelius was acquitted. Cicero could purr with satisfaction at a hatchet-job well done.

So dazzling had the performance been that it quite put in the shade a speech delivered at the trial by Caelius’ other guardian. Not that this would have concerned Crassus. He had never been one for pyrotechnics. He had no need of them. His purpose in coming to Caelius’ rescue had been to protect his investment in the young man’s future; a goal duly achieved, and at minimal political cost to himself. True, he had been privy to the demolition of Clodia, but even Clodius, rarely reticent in defence of his family’s honour, knew better than to lash out at Crassus. Subtle and understated in his methods he may have been, a man of whispered hints and promises rather than open threats, yet he remained the most menacing figure in Rome. Now at last, in the spring of 56, Crassus was preparing to test just how far that menace would carry him. Even as he spoke at Caelius’ trial his mind was elsewhere. A political masterstroke was being prepared.

The previous month Crassus had travelled to Ravenna, a town just beyond the frontier of Roman Italy, inside Caesar’s province of Gaul. Two other power-brokers had been waiting there for him. One had been Caesar himself, the other Clodius’ haughty eldest brother, Appius Claudius. Following a secret conference between the three men Crassus had returned to Rome, while Appius, staying with Caesar, had headed west. In mid-April the two conspirators arrived in the frontier town of Lucca. So too, heading north from Rome, did Pompey. A second conference was held. Again, its precise terms remained mysterious, but news of the meeting itself had spread so quickly that Pompey, arriving for it, had been accompanied by two hundred senators. More than a hundred bundles of fasces could be seen propped up in the Luccan streets. Senators on the make, their nostrils filled with the scent of power, scrabbled for advancement. To their more principled colleagues back in Rome, the clamouring of these aristocratic petitioners delivered an ominous message. Once again, authority appeared to be draining away from the Senate. Perhaps the triumvirate was not dead, after all?

And yet it seemed barely credible that Pompey and Crassus could have patched up an alliance a second time. What compact could they possibly have reached? And what of Caesar’s role in the murky business? What was he after now? One of the first to find out was Cicero. Chastened by his experience of exile, he no longer had any illusions that he could hold out against the combined might of the triumvirate. Against Clodius and Clodia, yes, but not against those who were infinitely his superior ‘in resources, armed force, and naked power’.² When Pompey leaned on him he crumpled. Vulnerable and nervy, eloquent and respected, Cicero made a perfect tool. He was put to work straight away. That summer he had to stand up in the Senate House and propose that the provinces of Gaul, which Domitius Ahenobarbus had been eyeing so hopefully, remain Caesar’s, and his alone. Domitius, taken aback by this volte-face, exploded with fury. What was Cicero up to? Why was he arguing for something that he had once condemned as outrageous? Had he no shame? In private such questions left Cicero sick with misery. He knew that he was being exploited, and hated himself for it. In public, however, he paraded the ingenious argument that by changing sides he was in fact displaying statesmanship. ‘Standing rigid and unchanging has never been considered a great virtue in the Republic,’ he pointed out. Far from trimming, he was merely ‘moving with the times’.³

No one was much convinced – Cicero himself least of all. Maudlin with self-contempt, he tried to cheer himself up by indulging in the one constant he had been left, his blood-feud with Clodius. High on the Capitol, the bronze tablet celebrating his exile was still on public display. Accompanied by Milo, Cicero took it down, removed it and hid it in his house.* Clodius not only had the nerve to denounce him for unconstitutional behaviour, a complaint upheld by Cato at his most sententious, but also erected billboards on the Palatine advertising a long list of Cicero’s crimes. Even among the shifting sands of the Republic there were some things that never changed.

Yet even as their dog-fight twisted this way and that, the two men found themselves joined by more than mutual hatred. Appius had decided that it was time he became consul: hence his trips to Ravenna and Lucca to meet the triumvirs. In return for their backing in the elections for 54 he had offered them the support of himself and his youngest brother. For Pompey in particular, who had spent two years being harried and humiliated by Clodius, this was a rich prize indeed. The inimitable talents of Rome’s greatest rabble-rouser were now the triumvirs’ to do with as they pleased. Just as Cicero had been employed as the tool of Caesar’s interests, so Clodius was put to work serving those of Pompey and Crassus. Orders went out to his network of tribunes and gang-leaders. A campaign of intimidation was launched, its aim to secure the postponement of the consular elections for 55. The violence, as it tended to do whenever Clodius was involved, quickly escalated. A band of senators attempted to block his entry into the Senate House; Clodius’ supporters responded by threatening to burn the Senate House to the ground. Meanwhile, the elections had still not been held, and all the while Rome was filling with the triumvirs’ clients, including a great flood of Caesar’s veterans, given special leave from Gaul. Outraged senators put on mourning. Horrible suspicions crowded their minds. At last the question that had been buzzing around Rome for months was put openly to Pompey and Crassus, both of whom had been attempting, in their most statesmanlike manner, to stay above the fray. Were they planning to stand for the consulship of 55? Crassus, slippery as ever, answered that he would do whatever was best for the Republic, but Pompey, pinned down by insistent questioning, finally blurted out the truth. The carve-up that had enabled them to bury their rivalry stood revealed to the world.

Opposition was instantaneous and implacable. The two candidates were taken aback. Having postponed the elections in order to fill the city with Caesar’s veterans, they now began to panic that they might still not win. Midnight visits were paid to the homes of rival candidates. Muscles were flexed, arms twisted. Only Domitius refused to stand down. By now it was January. For the first weeks of 55 there had been no consuls at all, and elections could no longer be postponed. Hours before the voting pens opened, in the dead of night, Domitius and Cato attempted to stake a place on the Campus Martius. There they were surprised by armed thugs who killed their torchbearer, wounded Cato, and put their men to flight. The next day Pompey and Crassus duly secured their second joint consulship. Even now they had not finished with their election rigging. When Cato won a praetorship Pompey had the result declared void. The aedileships were shamelessly parcelled out to supporters; so much so, in fact, that the Campus erupted into fresh violence. This time Pompey was caught in the thick of it and his toga splashed with blood.

The sodden garment was taken back to his home, where his pregnant wife was waiting anxiously for news. When Julia saw the blood-caked toga she fainted with shock and her baby was lost. No one could be surprised that the sight of Pompey the Great spattered with the gore of his fellow citizens should have resulted in his wife’s miscarriage. By such signs did the gods make their judgements known. The Republic itself was being aborted. Cicero, writing in confidence to Atticus, joked miserably that the triumvirs’ notebooks were no doubt filled with ‘lists of future election results’.⁴ To their peers, the criminality of Pompey and Crassus was so naked as to appear sacrilegious. Whereas before, in 59, they had employed Caesar as their proxy, now it was they who were staining the sacred office of the consulship. And to what end? Surely they had already both won glory enough? Why, merely to secure the consulship for a second time, had they resorted to such violent and illegal extremes?

The answer was not long in coming, and even Pompey and Crassus had the grace to be embarrassed by it. When a tame tribune came forward with a bill that would give the consuls five-year commands in Syria and Spain the two men affected innocent surprise, but no one was fooled. The more closely the terms of the bill were inspected, the more dismaying they appeared. The two proconsuls were to have the right to levy troops, and declare war and peace, without reference to the Senate or the people. A separate bill awarded identical privileges to Caesar, confirming him in his command and extending it for a further five years. Between them, the three members of the syndicate would now have direct control of twenty legions and Rome’s most critical provinces. The city had often echoed to cries of ‘tyranny’ – but never, surely, with such justification as now.

From its earliest days the nightmare that its own ideals might turn against it had haunted the Republic. ‘It is disturbing’, Cicero reflected, ‘that it tends to be men of genius and brilliance who are consumed by the desire for endless magistracies and military commands, and by the lust for power and glory.’⁵ An ancient insight. The Romans had always appreciated that everything they found most splendid in a citizen might also be a source of danger. This explained why, over the centuries, so many limits upon the free play of ambition had evolved. Laws and customs, precedents and myths, these formed the fabric of the Republic. No citizen could afford to behave as though they did not exist. To do so was to risk downfall and eternal shame. Pompey and Crassus, true Romans, understood this in their blood. It was why Pompey could conquer by land and sea, and yet yearn for the respect of a man like Cato. It was why Crassus could be the most feared man in Rome, and yet choose to veil his power behind shadows. Now, however, their scruples were no longer sufficient to restrain them. After all, in order to win his second consulship, Pompey had almost had Cato killed. And Crassus, during the debate on his proconsular command, grew so heated that he punched a senator in the face.

Indeed, it was generally observed, in that summer of 55, just how excitable this formerly discreet man had become. Crassus had turned voluble and boastful. When he won the governorship of Syria by lot he could not stop talking about it. Even had he not been in his sixties such behaviour would have been regarded as unseemly. Suddenly, people were laughing at him behind his back. This had never happened before. The more that Crassus stepped into the full glare of unpopularity, the more his sinister mystique began to fade. He found himself being jostled by mobs, and even, on occasions, having to turn tail and beg Pompey for protection. With such humiliations did the Roman people punish Crassus for his betrayal of the Republic. When the time finally came for him to depart for his province no celebrations accompanied him, no cheering crowds. ‘What a villain he is!’⁶ Cicero exclaimed, gloating over the shabbiness of Crassus’ departure. But the lack of a rousing send-off was not the worst. As the proconsul clattered out through the city gates on to the Appian Way he found a tribune waiting for him by the side of the road. Earlier, the same man had attempted to arrest Crassus, a stunt contemptuously brushed aside. Now he was standing by a brazier. Clouds of incense rose from it, drifting across the tombs of ancient heroes, perfuming the winter breeze. Gazing at Crassus, the tribune began to chant. The words were archaic, barely comprehensible, but their portent was perfectly clear: Crassus was being cursed.

To such an accompaniment, then, did he set out from Rome on his Eastern command. Nothing could better have reminded him of the high price he had paid to secure it. What had previously been dearest to Crassus, his prestige, was shot to pieces. No wonder, during his consulship, that he had betrayed signs of nerves. Yet these were not, as his enemies hinted, evidence of senility or a loosening grip. In the ledger of Crassus’ mind, costs and benefits were still being balanced as cynically as ever. Only a prize beyond compare could have persuaded him to sacrifice his credit in the Republic. Syria on its own would hardly serve as recompense. In exchange for his good name Crassus wanted nothing less than the riches of the world.

In the past he had mocked such fantasies. His bitter rival, during his third and most grandiloquent triumph, had been followed by a giant float representing the globe. Yet Pompey the Great had been too nervous of the role of Alexander to indulge in it wholeheartedly, too respectful of the traditions of his city. Crassus, understanding this, and confirmed in his contempt for Pompey’s braggadocio, had originally felt no need to play the world conqueror himself. But then Caesar had taken up the role. In the space of two short years he had won himself wealth to rival Pompey’s. Crassus, chill and calculating, had not been slow to recognise the implications of this. Travelling to Ravenna, reaching his compact with Pompey and Caesar, mounting his brutal election campaign, he had been prompted by a mingling of greed and fear, of rampant avarice, and of a dread of being left behind. More clearly perhaps than either of his partners in crime, he had glimpsed an unsettling new order. In it a few high-achievers – maybe two, but Crassus hoped three – would wield a degree of power so disproportionate to that of their fellow citizens that Rome herself would be placed in their shadow. After all, if the Republic were the mistress of the world, then for men who dared seize control of it, and marshal its resources as they pleased, what limits could there be? The sky, perhaps – but nothing lower.

In the spring of 54 BC Crassus arrived in his new province and advanced to its eastern frontier. Beyond the River Euphrates a great trunk road stretched across flat desert until it passed into the glare of the horizon and could be seen no more. But Crassus knew where it led. Peering into the rising sun, he could glimpse, in his imagination, the haze of spices, the glint of onyx, cornelian and pearls. There were many fabulous reports of the riches of the East. It was said that in Persia there was a mountain formed entirely of gold; that in India the whole country was defended by ‘a wall built of ivory’;⁷ and that in China, the land of the Seres, silk was woven by creatures twice the size of beetles. No man of intelligence could believe such ludicrous stories, of course, but the fact that they were told served to illustrate an indubitable and glittering truth: the proconsul who made himself master of the Orient would have wealth beyond compare. No wonder that Crassus gazed east and dreamed.

Of course, if he were to plant the standards of the Roman people upon the shores of the Outer Ocean, then he would first have to deal with the barbarians at his door. Immediately beyond the Euphrates stood the kingdom of Parthia. Not much was known about it, except that the natives – like all Orientals – were effeminate and deceitful. Lucullus and Pompey had both signed peace treaties with them – an inconvenient detail that Crassus had not the slightest intention of respecting. Accordingly, in the summer of 54 he crossed the Euphrates and seized a number of frontier towns. The Parthians indignantly demanded his withdrawal. Crassus refused. Having procured his war, however, he was content to bide his time. The first year of his governorship he spent in profitable looting. The Temple in Jerusalem, and many others, were stripped bare. ‘Days were spent hunched over the measuring scales.’⁸Thanks to his careful accounting, Crassus was able to recruit an army truly worthy of his ambitions: seven legions, four thousand light infantry, as many horsemen again. Among the cavalry – an exotic touch – were a thousand Gauls. Their commander was Crassus’ youngest son, Publius, who had served with such success under Caesar and now looked to repeat his dashing exploits for his father. All was ready. In the spring of 53 Crassus and his army crossed the Euphrates again. The great adventure had begun.

At first the emptiness appeared to mock the scale of Crassus’ preparations. Ahead of his army, to the east, nothing could be seen save the haze of the heat. Then, at length, the advance guard came across hoofprints, the tracks of what appeared to be a large cavalry division. These turned aside from the road and vanished into the desert. Crassus decided to follow them. Soon the legions found themselves marching across a desolate plain with not a stream, nor even a blade of grass, in sight, only scorching dunes of sand. The Romans began to wilt. Crassus’ ablest lieutenant, a quaestor by the name of Cassius Longinus, urged his general to turn round, but Crassus, so skilled at making strategic retreats in the political arena, would not hear of it now. On the legions advanced. Then came the news for which their general had been hoping. The Parthians were near, and not just a cavalry division, but a large army. Eager to ensure that the enemy did not escape him, Crassus ordered on his legions. They were now in the heart of the baking, sandy plain. They could make out horsemen ahead of them, shabby and dusty. The legionaries locked shields. As they did so, the Parthians dropped aside their robes to reveal that both they and their horses were clad in glittering mail. At the same moment, from all around the plain, came the eerie sound of drums and clanging bells, a din ‘like the roaring of wild predators, but intermingled with the sharpness of a thunderclap’.⁹ To the Romans, it seemed barely human, a hallucination bred from the shimmering heat. Hearing it, they shuddered.

And all that long day was to have the pattern of a bad dream. The Parthians fled every effort to engage them, fading like mirages across the dunes, but armed, as they wheeled and galloped away, with steel-tipped arrows, which they fired into the sweating, parched, immobile ranks of legionaries. When Publius led his Gauls in pursuit, they were surrounded by the enemy’s heavy cavalry and wiped out. Publius himself was decapitated, and a Parthian horseman, brandishing the head on a spear, galloped along the ranks of Romans, jeering them and screaming insults at Publius’ father. By now the legions were surrounded. All day long the Parthians’ deadly arrows rained down upon them, and all day long, doggedly, heroically, the legions held out. With the blessed coming of dusk the shattered remnants of Crassus’ great expedition began to withdraw, retracing their steps to Carrhae, the nearest city of any size. From there, under the resourceful leadership of Cassius, a few straggling survivors made their way back across the Roman frontier. They left behind them twenty thousand of their compatriots dead on the battlefield, and ten thousand more as prisoners. Seven eagles had been lost. Not since Cannae had a Roman army suffered such a catastrophic defeat.

Crassus himself, stupefied by the utter ruin of all his hopes, was lured by the Parthians into a parley. Having tricked so many, he now found himself tricked in his turn. Caught up in a scuffle, he was struck down. Death spared Crassus a humiliating ordeal. Baulked of their prey, the Parthians inflicted it instead on an impersonator drawn from the ranks of their prisoners. Dressed as a woman, escorted by lictors whose rods were adorned by moneybags, and axes by legionaries’ heads, followed by jeering prostitutes, the captive was led in a savage parody of a triumph. Clearly, the Parthians knew more of Roman military traditions then the Romans had known of theirs.

Meanwhile, the head of the real Crassus had been dispatched to the court of the Parthian king. It arrived just as a celebrated actor, Jason of Tralles, was singing a scene from Euripides’ great tragedy, The Bacchae. By a gruesome coincidence, this was a play that featured a severed head. Jason, with the quick thinking of a true professional, seized the gory trophy and cradled it in his arms, then improvised an apt soliloquy. Unsurprisingly, the spectacle of Crassus as a prop in his own tragedy brought the house down.

For a man who had aimed so high and been brought so low, no more fitting end could have been devised.

The sky, after all, had not proved the limit.

Ad Astra

It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic’s greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Romans’ concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist that they had won their empire purely in self-defence. To people who had been flattened by the legions, this argument may have appeared laughable, but the Romans believed it all the same, and often with a deadly seriousness. Opposition to Crassus’ war against Parthia, for instance, had been bitter. Everyone knew that there had been no excuse for it save greed. The blood-soaked sands of Carrhae showed that the gods had known this too.

All the same, Crassus was not the only man to have dreamed of pushing Rome’s supremacy to the limits of the world. Something was changing in the mood of the Republic. Globalising fantasies were much in the air. The globe itself could be found on coins as well as triumphal floats. The old suspicion of empire was fading fast. Overseas commitments, it appeared, could be made to work. Even the most conservative elements in the Senate were coming to accept this. In 58 Cato had left Rome for the island of Cyprus. His mission was to annexe it. Originally, he had been violently opposed to such a policy, not least because it had been proposed by Clodius, who planned to use revenues from Cyprus to fund his extravagant corn dole. But when the tribune, with typically malevolent cunning, had proposed that his most upright opponent be sent to administer Rome’s new possession, and the Senate had enthusiastically agreed, Cato had felt duty bound to go. Arriving in Cyprus, he had exercised his duties with his customary scrupulousness. The Cypriots had been given peace and good government, and the Roman people the old ruler’s treasure. Cato had returned home loaded with silver and a library of account books. So delighted had the Senate been by the honest dealings it found transcribed within them that it had awarded Cato the privilege of wearing a toga edged with purple – an extravagance that Cato had sternly turned down.

Even so, he was proud of what he had achieved in Cyprus – not only for the Republic, but for the provincials themselves. It appeared to him self-evident that the rule of an upstanding Roman administrator was vastly preferable to the squalid anarchy that had prevailed in Cyprus before his arrival. Here was a portentous development: the Senate’s most unbending traditionalist squaring Rome’s ancient virtues with her new world role. Greek intellectuals, of course, had long been pushing for this – as Cato would well have known, for he was a keen scholar of philosophy, which he studied with the seriousness he brought to all he did. It was Posidonius, every Roman’s favourite guru, who had argued that subject peoples should welcome their conquest by the Republic, since it would contribute towards the building of a commonwealth of man. Now the Romans themselves were latching on to the same argument. Assumptions that would have been unthinkable even a few decades previously were becoming commonplace. Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilising mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace. Morality had not merely caught up with the brute fact of imperial expansion, but wanted more.

It helped, of course, that the empire brought colour and clamour to Rome, the news of conquests from strange, far-distant lands, the flooding of gold through her streets. Throughout the sixties BC the Romans had associated such pleasures with the name of Pompey. Now, in the fifties, they could enjoy them again, courtesy of Caesar. Even in the dankest reaches of Gaul, the proconsul never forgot his audience back at home. He lavished his attentions on them. He had always taken pleasure in spending money on other people – it was one of the qualities that made him loved – and now, at last, that money was his own. Gallic plunder flowed south. Caesar was generous to everyone: his friends, anyone he thought might prove useful, and the whole of Rome. Preparations began to be made for a huge extension of the Forum, one that could hardly fail to keep his name on everybody’s lips. But if Caesar aimed to woo his fellow citizens with gargantuan complexes of marble, he also wished to entertain them, to have them thrill to the glamour of his exploits. His dispatches were masterpieces of war reporting. No Roman could read them without feeling a rush of excitement and pride. Caesar knew how to make his fellow citizens feel good about themselves. As so often before, he was putting on a show – and as an arena he had the entire, spectacular expanse of Gaul.

Of course, in March 56 BC, had it not been for his quick thinking and diplomatic skills, he might have lost it to Domitius Ahenobarbus. The risk had forced him to move fast. It had been Caesar who had suggested the meetings at Ravenna and Lucca with Crassus and Pompey. He had felt no particular jealousy of the ambitions of his two partners in the triumvirate. As far as he had been concerned, they could have whatever they wanted, just as long as he was allowed another five years as governor of Gaul.

While Caesar saw to the diplomacy at Ravenna and Lucca that would secure this, he knew that he was urgently needed in Britanny. A legion had been stationed there for the winter, and, with food supplies running low, its commander had been forced to send out foraging parties. Straying into the territory of a local tribe, the Venetians, some requisition officers had been kidnapped. The Venetians themselves, who had been forced to hand over hostages to the Romans the previous autumn, had hopefully suggested a swap, but while this was an offer that might have seemed reasonable enough to them, it had betrayed a woeful misunderstanding of their enemy. In their innocence the Venetians had assumed that the Romans were playing by the accepted rules of tribal warfare, in which hit-and-run raids and ambushes, tit-for-tat skirmishes and hostage-taking, were all taken for granted. To the Romans, however, such tactics were terrorism, and punishable as such. Caesar prepared to teach the Venetians a devastating lesson. Because they were a maritime power, he ordered one of his ablest officers, Decimus Brutus, to construct a war fleet. The Venetian ships, taken by surprise, were wiped out. The tribe had no choice but to surrender. Its elders were executed and the rest of the population sold as slaves. Caesar, who normally prided himself on his clemency, had decided on this occasion ‘to make an example of the enemy, so that in future the barbarians would be more careful about respecting the rights of ambassadors’¹⁰ – by which, of course, he meant his requisition officers. The double-speak betrayed his real agenda. The Gauls had to be woken up to a new reality: from now on it was Caesar who would be setting the rules. Tribal squabblings and rebellions were things of the past. The country was to be at peace – a peace policed and upheld by Rome.

The brutal punishment of the Venetians had its desired effect. That winter, the mood throughout Gaul was one of sullen submission. Most tribes had still not measured themselves against the Romans, but rumour had done its work, and it was now widely known that the terrifying newcomers had proved themselves invincible wherever they had been met in combat. Only into the dense forests of Germany, it appeared, had the news failed to penetrate. In the spring of 55 BC, two tribes made the mistake of crossing the Rhine into Gaul. Caesar’s patience with fractious natives was by now wearing thin. The invaders were summarily wiped out. Then, in order to deliver the barbarians beyond the Rhine an unmistakable warning, Caesar crossed the river himself. He did this not in a boat – a mode of transport that struck him as ‘beneath his dignity’¹¹ – but over a specially constructed bridge. The engineering brilliance required to build it spoke as loudly of Roman power as did the bristling discipline of the legions who crossed it: the Germans on the far bank took one look at the monstrous wooden structure rising out of the rushing currents and melted into the woods. These, the fabled forests of Germany, were the subject of many tall tales. They were said to be the haunt of strange monsters, and to stretch so interminably that a man could walk for two months and still not leave them behind. Caesar, peering into their murk, had no intention of putting such stories to the test: leaving the Germans to cower in the shadows, he burned their villages and crops, then crossed the Rhine back to Gaul. The bridge, constructed with such skill and effort, he ordered to be pulled down.

Caesar had always had a penchant for spectacular acts of demolition. After all, only a decade previously he had levelled his new villa and thereby made himself the talk of Rome. The iron-bodied general who always snatched his soldier’s rations in the saddle, who was capable of inspiring whole legions with his courage, who shared every rigour and hardship that he imposed upon his men, sleeping on frozen ground wrapped only in his cloak, was still the flamboyant Caesar of old. The tastes he had indulged as a rake, for excitement and grand gestures, now infused his strategy as a proconsul of the Roman people. As ever, he looked to dazzle, to overawe. The building and levelling of a bridge across the Rhine had served only to whet his appetite for even more spectacular exploits. So it was that no sooner had Caesar crossed his men back into Gaul than he was marching them northwards, towards the Channel coast and the encircling Ocean.

Set within its icy waters waited the fabulous island of Britain. It was as drenched in mystery as in rain and fog. Back in Rome people doubted whether it existed at all. Even traders and merchants, Caesar’s usual sources of information, could provide only the sketchiest of details. Their reluctance to travel widely through the island was hardly surprising. It was well known that barbarians became more savage the further north one travelled, indulging in any number of unspeakable habits, such as cannibalism, and even – repellently – the drinking of milk. To teach them respect for the name of the Republic would be an achievement of Homeric proportions. For Caesar, who never let anyone forget that he could trace his ancestry back to the time of the Trojan War, the temptation was irresistible.

In his report to the Senate he sought to justify an attack on Britain by claiming that the natives had come to the help of the rebellious Venetians, and that, anyway, the country was rich in silver and tin. This was not entirely convincing – for if either motive had really been uppermost in Caesar’s mind, then he would have given himself an entire season’s campaigning in the island. As it was, the Roman fleet did not set sail until July. It was indeed to prove a journey back in time. Waiting for the invaders on the Kentish cliffs was a scene straight out of legend: warriors careering up and down in chariots, just as Hector and Achilles had done on the plain of Troy. To add to the exotic nature of it all, the Britons wore peculiar facial hair and were painted blue. So taken aback were the legionaries that they stood cowering in their transport boats until finally a standard-bearer, clutching his eagle to him, plunged into the waves alone and started wading towards the shore. His comrades, shamed into action, piled into the water after him. After some messy fighting a beach-head was established. Some more battles were fought, some villages burned, and some hostages taken. Then, with bad weather closing in, Caesar had his men pack up and sail back to Gaul.

Nothing remotely concrete had been achieved, but in Rome the news that an army of the Republic had crossed both the Rhine and the Ocean caused a sensation. True, a few inveterate spoilsports such as Cato pointed out that Caesar was now exceeding his brief more monstrously than ever and charged him with war crimes. Most citizens were in no mood to care. Even the lack of plunder did little to dampen the general mood of wild enthusiasm. ‘It’s now definite that there isn’t an ounce of silver in the whole of Britain,’ Cicero reported a few months later, ‘nor any prospect of loot apart from slaves. And even then,’ he added sniffily, ‘it’s hardly as though you’d expect a slave with a decent knowledge of music or literature to emerge from Britain, is it?’¹² But his tone of amused hauteur fooled no one. Cicero was as excited as anyone, and in 54, when there was a second summer of campaigning across the Channel, he followed events with a feverish interest. So did everyone else: Rome was agog for news. In their impact on a waiting public Caesar’s expeditions to Britain have been aptly compared to the moon landings: ‘they were an imagination-defying epic, an achievement at once technological and straight out of an adventure story’.¹³ Few doubted that the entire island would soon be forced to bow to the Republic’s supremacy. Only Cato was immune to the war fever. He shook his head and warned sombrely of the anger of the gods.

And sure enough, Caesar had indeed pushed too far, too fast. As he crossed the Thames in search of the frustratingly elusive Britons, his agents brought him ominous news: the harvest in Gaul had failed; rebellion was threatening; Caesar was needed back in person immediately. There had already been one violent storm in the Channel, and the legionaries lived in terror of a second destroying their fleet and marooning them for the winter. Caesar decided to cut his losses. A face-saving treaty was patched up with a local chieftain. The dream of reaching the ends of the world had to be put on hold. Although he disguised the painful truth as well as he could from his fellow citizens, Caesar had over-reached himself. At stake now was not the conquest of Britain, but the very future of a Roman Gaul.

That winter and the following summer danger came from various tribal uprisings, isolated bushfires of rebellion. The garrison of one legionary camp was ambushed and wiped out – almost seven thousand men were lost. Another was laid under siege and only rescued by Caesar himself in the nick of time. The proconsul, nervous that the flames of rebellion might spread, was everywhere, crisscrossing the country, stamping out the sparks. Sometimes he would leave the Gauls themselves to do the fire-fighting, handing over the territory of rebellious tribes to their neighbours to plunder as they pleased. Divide and rule – the policy still held good. Summer 53 BC passed and still there had been no general conflagration. Caesar began to relax. The previous year he had been forced to campaign throughout the winter, but not now. The new year found him in Ravenna planning for the end of his governorship and a glorious return to Rome. To his anxious fellow citizens, he announced – yet again – the pacification of Gaul.

That January of 52 BC the snow never stopped falling. In the mountain passes it lay especially thick. Caesar’s legions, stationed in the far north of the country, were cut off from their general. But bad weather was soon to be the least of their problems. Despite the snow, the Gauls were perfectly able to make contact with one another. Across the lowlands of the country war bands were massing. Seemingly against the odds, a great horde of tribes in northern and central Gaul had begun to negotiate a compact, burying their differences in the face of the common foe. The organiser of this alliance, and its undisputed leader, was an imposing nobleman by the name of Vercingetorix. ‘As a commander, he displayed the utmost attention to detail and discipline, for he was determined to whip waverers into shape.’¹⁴ These were qualities that even Caesar could respect, as well he might – for they were the qualities of a Roman. Vercingetorix hated the invaders, but he had studied them assiduously, determined to master the secrets of their success. When he ordered every tribe to send him a specified quota of troops, he was emulating the methods of Roman administrators and tax collectors, the agents of an order that spanned Gaul and far beyond. The world was shrinking. Win or lose, the Gauls could not hope to alter that. Their new unity was bred of both desperation and the global reach of Rome. It was Caesar who had taught the Gauls what it meant to be a nation. Now that achievement threatened to destroy him.

Or so it seemed. In fact, although an alliance of Gallic tribes was precisely what Caesar had spent six years desperately working to avoid, it also offered him a tantalising opportunity – a chance to crush resistance once and for all. As he always preferred to do, he went directly for the jugular. With Vercingetorix’s army massing on the border of the old Roman province, threatening the Republic’s rule over the whole of Gaul beyond the Alps, Caesar sped towards the centre of the revolt. To do this, he had to breast passes covered in two metres of snow, and gallop with only the smallest escort through the wilds of enemy territory. His daring was rewarded. He succeeded in joining with his legions. But now Caesar too was cut off from Italy. The Romans were starving, for Vercingetorix had persuaded his allies to burn their supplies rather than allow the hated enemy to seize them. Desperate for food, Caesar succeeded in storming one city but was repulsed from another, his first defeat in open combat after six years as proconsul. The news encouraged even more tribes to throw in their lots with Vercingetorix. Some of Caesar’s lieutenants began to despair: they advised their general to try to fight his way back to safety, to preserve what he could from the ruin, to abandon Gaul.

Caesar refused. ‘It would have been shameful and humiliating’¹⁵ – and therefore unthinkable. Whatever his own doubt and weariness, his outward show of confidence remained as sovereign as ever. In Caesar’s energy there was something demonic and sublime. Touched by boldness, perseverance and a yearning to be the best, it was the spirit of the Republic at its most inspiring and lethal. No wonder that his men worshipped him, for they too were Roman, and felt privileged to be sharing in their general’s great adventure. Battle-hardened by years of campaigning, they were in no mood to panic now at the peril of their situation. Their faith in Caesar and their own invincibility held good.

When Vercingetorix, presuming otherwise, attempted to finish them off, Caesar’s troops inflicted heavy losses on his cavalry and forced them to withdraw. Deciding to wait for reinforcements, Vercingetorix withdrew to the town of Alesia – a stronghold north of modern-day Dijon, and so impregnable that it had never before been captured. Caesar, rarely one to be impressed by precedent, straight away put it under siege. A huge line of earthworks, almost fifteen miles long, imprisoned Vercingetorix and his men within the town. Alesia had food sufficient for thirty days, but thirty days passed, and still the siege held firm. The Gauls began to starve. Vercingetorix, determined at all costs to maintain the strength of his warriors, settled on the grim expedient of expelling from Alesia anyone unable to fight. Women and children, the old and the sick, all were driven from the town walls. Caesar, however, refused to let them pass, or even, although they begged him, to take them as slaves. Instead, determined to shame Vercingetorix into letting the refugees back into Alesia, he left them huddled in the open, where they ate grass, and slowly died of sickness or the cold.

Then at last came the news for which Caesar had been bracing himself. Two hundred thousand Gauls were hurrying to their leader’s rescue. Immediately, Caesar ordered a second line of fortifications to be built, this time facing outwards. Wave after wave of screaming, sword-slashing warriors broke against the defences. All day, the Roman ramparts held. Dusk brought a respite – but not the end of the ordeal. The Gauls had been testing the Roman blockade, searching out its weakest point – and they had found it. To the north of the town, where two legions had established their camp, a hill directly overlooked the fortifications, and it was from here, at dawn, that the war bands pressed their attack. Filling in the trenches, they swarmed over the palisades, while ahead of them, in the Romans’ rear, came the answering war-cries of Vercingetorix’s men. The legionaries, trapped between this pincer, fought back with desperate ferocity. Both sides knew that the decisive moment was at hand. The Romans – just – managed to hold their lines. Even as the Gauls, seeking to pull down the palisade with hooks, heaved and cheered at the splintering of watchtowers, so, from the legionaries manning the gaps, there rose an answering cheer. In the distance, at the top of the hill overlooking their position, they had caught a flash of scarlet: their general’s cloak. Caesar, who had spent all the day galloping along the line of fortifications, yelling encouragements to his men and following the rhythms of the desperate struggle, had finally decided to commit his last reserves. Having slipped out unnoticed from the fortifications, and taking the Gauls utterly by surprise, the Roman cavalry charged down the hill. The legionaries, swords stabbing, advanced from the ramparts to meet them. Now it was the turn of the Gauls to be caught in a pincer movement. The slaughter was terrible, the Roman triumph total. Vercingetorix’s men, hearing the death-screams of their countrymen, withdrew back into Alesia. Outnumbered by the army he was besieging, and vastly outnumbered by the army that had been besieging him in turn, Caesar had defeated both. It was the greatest, the most astonishing, victory of his career.

The next morning Vercingetorix rode out from Alesia in glittering armour and knelt at his conqueror’s feet. Caesar, in no mood to be merciful, had him loaded with chains and thrown into prison. The war was not yet over, but it was already won. The victory had come at a terrible cost. Between the walls of Alesia and the Roman palisade lay the emaciated corpses of women and children. Above them were the bodies of warriors cut down by the legions, and beyond them, piled around the outer fortifications, stretching away from Alesia for miles, were innumerable corpses, the limbs of horses and humans horribly tangled, their bellies swollen, their blood fertilising the muddy fields, the slaughter-ground of Gallic liberty. And yet Alesia had been only a single battle. In all, the conquest of Gaul had cost a million dead, a million more enslaved, eight hundred cities taken by storm – or so the ancients claimed.¹⁶

These are near-genocidal figures. Whatever their accuracy – and there are historians prepared to accept them as plausible¹⁷ – they reflected a perception among Caesar’s contemporaries that his war against the Gauls had been something exceptional, at once terrible and splendid beyond compare. To the Romans, no truer measure of a man could be found than his capacity to withstand grim ordeals of exhaustion and blood. By such a reckoning, Caesar had proved himself the foremost man in the Republic. He had held firm to the sternest duty of a citizen: never to surrender, never to back down. If the cost of doing so had been warfare on a scale and of a terror rarely before experienced, then so much more the honour, for both himself and Rome. In 51 BC, the year after Alesia, when Caesar resolved to make an example of another rebellious city by chopping off the hands of everyone who had borne arms against him, he could take it for granted that ‘his clemency was so well known that no one would mistake such a severe measure for wanton cruelty’.¹⁸ He was right. Caesar was indeed famous – among the Romans – for his clemency. But he was even more famous for his love of glory – and in such a cause the whole of Gaul and beyond had been made to bleed.

Ultimately, however, the great task was done and there was peace. The Republic owed Caesar much. Surely, with his term of office now drawing to its finish, there would be magnificent honours waiting for him in Rome. The acclamation of his grateful fellow citizens, a splendid triumph, high office once again? After all, who could justly refuse any of these to Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul?

After almost a decade away he was ready to head for home.

Weeping for Elephants

In Rome, of course, there remained one man of greater renown and wealth than even Caesar. Pompey the Great lived in no one’s shadow. Certainly not that of Caesar, a man whom Pompey had always regarded as his protégé. Naturally, in the condescending manner that befitted Rome’s premier general, he took pride in his father-in-law’s achievements – but nothing more. The idea that Caesar might rival him, let alone surpass him, never crossed the great man’s mind.

Some tried desperately to open his eyes. Back in 55 BC, while Crassus was preparing for his expedition to the East and Caesar, far away in Gaul, was turning his thoughts to Britain, an unexpected visitor had come knocking on Pompey’s door. Cato had just been through a bruising few months. In January, attempting to block the second consulship of Pompey and Crassus, he had been badly beaten up by Pompey’s heavies. Since then, he had campaigned tirelessly and courageously against the granting of five-year commands to the two consuls, but again to no avail. Now Pompey wanted Caesar to have an identical command. Cato, swallowing his pride, had come to beg his adversary to reconsider. Could he not see that he was raising up a monster on his shoulders? The time would come when he would no longer have the strength to throw off Caesar, or to bear his weight. When that happened both men would totter, locked in a death-clinch, and collapse. And the Republic? Beneath the weight of two such colossi, the Republic would surely be flattened into dust.

Pompey rejected the appeal. In 55, of all years, he could feel sublimely confident of his power and good fortune. On the Campus Martius, where workmen had been labouring for years at his great theatre, the scaffolding had finally come down. Revealed to the astonished eyes of the Roman people was the most stupendous complex of buildings in their city’s history. Set within a beautiful park, it comprised not only an auditorium, but a public portico, a chamber for the Senate and a new house for Pompey himself. Surmounting it all was the temple to Venus, the device by which Pompey had been able to justify its construction in the first place, and that he trusted would serve to protect it for ever from the levelling instincts of jealous rivals.

This was a sensible precaution, for the entire complex stood as an exercise in provoking jealousy. No expense had been spared. In the gardens rare plants bore upon their aromas a soothing reminder of Pompey’s conquest of the East. In the portico gold-woven curtains hung between the columns, while in the background streams ran gently murmuring from countless fountains. Diaphanously draped goddesses, posing coyly in the shade, added to the ambience of what established itself overnight as the most romantic spot in Rome. All the statues and paintings were celebrated masterpieces, carefully selected by Atticus, that knowledgeable connoisseur, and a board of other experts, for Pompey had wished his displays to have the imprimatur of absolute quality. The most imposing piece of all, however, was not an antique, but a specially commissioned statue of Pompey himself. Strategically placed in the new Senate House, it ensured that even when the great man was absent his shadow would fall across the proceedings.

What need was there for the sponsor of such magnificence to go haring after barbarians in order to prove himself ? True, in the north of his allocated province of Spain there were savages still waiting to be tamed, but these were small fry, hardly worthy of a world conqueror’s attention. Not that Pompey wished to forfeit his command, or the legions that came with it. Rather, he planned to govern Spain from a distance, through the agency of lieutenants. Let Crassus go and fight the Parthians, and Caesar the Gauls – Pompey had already triumphed over three continents. Now, with his theatre completed, his many victories on behalf of the Republic could be restaged as spectacular entertainments. No travelling to the limits of the globe for Pompey the Great. Rather, at his command, the limits of the globe would meet in Rome.

And they would take on bestial form. Back in his twenties, as a precocious young general, Pompey had taken time out from pulverising Libyans to go lion-hunting. ‘Even the wild animals that live in Africa’, he had pronounced, ‘should be taught to respect the strength and courage of the Roman people.’¹⁹ Along the frontiers of the Republic’s empire, beyond the light of the legionary’s flickering campfire, lions stalked the night as they had done since the creation of the world, primordial symbols of terror, preying on man’s ease of mind. Yet now, in his fifties, wishing to celebrate the dedication of his theatre, Pompey could order them brought to his theatre – and it was done. And not only lions. A century later, fleets weighed down with ravening exotica would be seen as the perfect symbol of the Republic’s new global reach. ‘The padding tiger, shipped in a golden cage, lapping at human blood, applauded by the crowds.’²⁰ So wrote Petronius, Nero’s master of ceremonies, summing up an age.

It was important to Pompey’s purpose that the savagery of his imports serve to edify as well as entertain. This was why animals were rarely kept in zoos. Only by displaying them in combat, the monstrous matched with the human, could Pompey instruct his fellow citizens in what it took to be the rulers of the world. Sometimes the lesson was too much for the citizenry to bear. When twenty elephants, an unprecedented number, were attacked by spearmen, their trumpetings of distress so harrowed the spectators that everyone in the theatre began to weep. Cicero, who had been in the audience, puzzled over this. How was it possible, he wondered, that a spectacle so impressive had afforded so little delight?

He analysed his own feelings. The violence, rather than thrilling him, had left him numb. Prisoners being savaged by lions, proud and magnificent wild creatures being skewered on spears: neither seemed the kind of entertainment to afford a cultured man much pleasure. Yet if one thing had depressed Cicero about the entertainments above all others, it had been their scale. The slaughter of the twenty elephants had been merely the climax of what he freely acknowledged to have been ‘the most lavish and magnificent show of all time’²¹ – an unparalleled display of the Republic’s greatness. Pompey had filled his theatre with wonders from every corner of the empire: not only lions, tigers and elephants, but leopards, lynxes, rhinoceroses and stag-wolves, to say nothing of the mysterious cephos,* a creature from Ethiopia with the hands and feet of a man, so rare that it was never seen in Rome again. And yet Cicero, a citizen passionately proud of his city’s achievements, the most articulate spokesman for Rome’s global destiny that the Republic had ever produced, was left bored and oppressed by his hero’s games: ‘If these are sights which must be seen, then you have seen them many times.’²² Pleasure and excitement had both been dulled by excess. Cicero could no longer identify with the emotions that Pompey wished him to feel. Games designed to glorify the Republic served to glorify only the sponsor himself. Gazing humbly down upon the carnage, spaced around the theatre, were fourteen statues, each one representing a nation conquered by Pompey.²³ Marble and blood combined to create an extravaganza of self-promotion unmatched in the Republic’s history. Never before had the Romans been made to feel quite so inferior to a man who was, after all, a citizen just like them. Was this why the distress of the elephants had moved them more deeply than the mastery of the spearmen? At the end of the games, rather than cheering ‘the general and the lavish display which he had laid on especially to honour them, they rose to their feet, and, through their tears, called down curses upon his head’.²⁴

Of course, the Roman people were fickle: their anger with Pompey rarely lasted for long. Yet their suspicions – of his greatness, of his generosity – remained. Pompey’s games had been staged in September 55 BC; weeks later his fellow citizens went to the polls. Despite – or perhaps because of – the new theatre complex looming massively in the background, they delivered its sponsor a pointed rebuff. The previous year Pompey had blocked the candidacies of Domitius Ahenobarbus and Cato; now, for the year 54, both men were elected – Domitius as consul and Cato as praetor. True, there was one candidate backed by Pompey who did secure election, and to the consulship, no less – but Appius Claudius, despite his role as one of the conspirators at Lucca, was hardly a reliable ally. Imperturbable and self-serving, he did no one’s bidding but his own. He might not have built a theatre, but he had breeding, and that, in his own opinion, counted for much more.

The results brought home to Pompey the full ambiguity of his position. By any reckoning he was the first citizen in the Republic. He had just completed his second consulship; he was the governor of Spain, the commander and general of its army; his generosity was the wonder of Rome. Yet the more he sought to consolidate his power, the more it seemed to slip through his fingers. Every effort that he made to secure pre-eminence brought a matching defeat. Increasingly criminal in his methods, Pompey remained conformist in his dreams. The consulships of Appius and Domitius, both of them notorious for their arrogance, mocked the insecurities of the arriviste. So too, and even more cruelly, did the praetorship of Cato. This infuriating, obdurate, extraordinary man had no legions, no great wealth with which to bribe his fellow citizens. In rank he was not even the equal of a consul, let alone of Caesar or Pompey. Yet he wielded an authority hardly less than that of either. Even as senators took their seats in Pompey’s theatre, or surreptitiously accepted presents from Gaul, they still identified themselves with Cato, with his principles and beliefs. Over the years he seemed to have become the embodiment of legitimacy – almost of the Republic itself. Caesar, far away in Gaul, could afford to scoff at such pretensions. But Pompey, who in his heart of hearts still yearned for Cato’s approval, could not.

Such approval now appeared as remote as ever. The brutality of Pompey’s actions in seizing the consulship would not lightly be forgiven. His army remained a standing menace. Nor did Pompey have the slightest intention of giving up so much as a single legionary. Yet even as he persisted in intimidating the establishment he clung to his hope of winning its heart. For the citizens of a republic such as Rome, loneliness was a bewildering, almost incomprehensible state. Only outlaws – or kings – could truly know it. This was why Pompey, no matter how violently he offended his peers, still wooed them. He had been loved too long, too ardently, not to crave and need love still.

It was a cruel irony, then, that even as he returned to his improbable courtship of the Senate his personal life, which had been so happy and such a comfort to him, should suddenly have darkened. In August 54 BC his adored wife Julia went into labour. Again she miscarried, but this time she did not survive the loss of her baby. Her husband and father were left equally devastated. For Caesar, however, grief was compounded by alarm. The love that both he and Pompey had felt for Julia had provided the two men with a bond strong enough to survive any number of political tensions. Now that bond was gone. Caesar, preoccupied with rebellions in Gaul, was desperate not to have his position back in the capital weakened. He needed Pompey more than Pompey needed him, and both men knew it. For a while their shared bereavement would continue to unite them, but not for ever. How long would Pompey stay single? His eligibility was a valuable asset – far too valuable not to be exploited. His return to the marriage market would give him unanticipated room for manoeuvre. And that, of course, was precisely what unsettled his partner so much.

Yet Pompey was still hemmed in by obligations. For as long as the menacing figure of Crassus remained on the horizon, he would remain nervous of offending Caesar. Mutual fear, not affection, was what had provided the triumvirate with its cement. No one partner could stand up to the other two. This was why, in carving up the Republic’s empire, the three conspirators had been so careful to interlock their power bases. By doing so they aimed to defend themselves from one another as much as from their common foes. But then, a year after Julia’s death, midway through 53 BC, the news arrived from Carrhae that Crassus was dead. For Caesar this was a second devastating blow, but it is unlikely that Pompey shed many tears. After all, what sweeter measure of success could there be than the failure of a rival? Let the Roman people shudder – the Parthian victory would serve to remind them that victories against Eastern barbarians could never be taken for granted. Should the situation on the frontier turn really ugly, then Pompey’s fellow citizens would know where to turn. But even if – as happened – the Parthians did not press their advantage into Syria, Pompey could still stretch his limbs and exult in a novel feeling. A malign presence had been exorcised from his life. Never again would it shadow him, cabin him, torment him. Crassus was no more.

Now, suddenly, everything seemed to be moving Pompey’s way. Sleaze had begun to corrode the moral authority of the Senate. The consulship of Appius and Domitius had ended amid high outrage when the two men were accused of accepting bribes to fix the forthcoming consular elections. Four candidates had been standing and all four were indicted. Amid escalating rumours of ever more shady deals, the elections had to be postponed for six months. For Domitius, and the cause of senatorial respectability for which he had been the spokesman, the scandal was a particular calamity. As Cicero cattily pointed out, Appius had no reputation to lose, ‘but his colleague is left a broken reed, utterly discredited’.²⁵ Such was the turmoil that it seemed only one man could restore order. Pompey’s lapdogs began to mutter that he should be made dictator. When Cato, to no one’s surprise, exploded at the suggestion, Pompey ostentatiously turned down the offer. But still the whisperings would not be silenced. They could be heard throughout the feverish, troubled capital: in the Senate House, the Forum, the slums. The Republic was collapsing. A strongman was needed. Only Pompey would do. Pompey himself kept his peace, looked modest, and bided his time.

It was the perfect strategy. As the sense of crisis steadily deepened, the mood in the Republic began to turn brutal as well as fetid. In his desperation to find a forceful counterweight to Pompey, Cato had settled upon an extraordinary choice. His favoured candidate for the consulship of 52 was none other than Clodius’ old sparring-partner, the turbulent street-brawler Milo. Once a ferocious partisan of Pompey, Milo had been unceremoniously dumped by the great man, and was therefore happy to throw his lot in with Cato and his plans. Pompey warned his former protégé to stand down, and when Milo refused threw his weight behind rival candidates. But his fury was, of course, nothing compared to that of Milo’s deadliest enemy. For three years Clodius had been on his best behaviour, attempting to rebrand himself as a sound and sober statesman, but the prospect of having Milo as a consul was too much. Like a reformed alcoholic reaching for a bottle, Clodius returned to the streets. His old gangs were resurrected. In reply Milo bought up the gladiator schools. As 53 BC drew to a close, Rome descended into anarchy. So too did the Republic. For the third time in four years elections were postponed, this time because the presiding official had been knocked out by a brick. With all public business in abeyance, club-wielding mobsters roamed the streets, while law-abiding citizens cowered where they could.

It seemed that things could hardly become any worse. Then, on 18 January 52 BC, they did. Clodius and Milo met face to face on the Appian Way. Taunts flew; one of Milo’s gladiators flung a javelin; Clodius was struck in the shoulder. His bodyguards hauled their wounded leader to a nearby tavern, but Milo’s heavies, following in pursuit, overpowered them. Clodius himself was slung out of the tavern on to the road, where he was speedily finished off. There, by the side of a shrine to the Good Goddess, his corpse was left mangled and naked in the dust. It appeared that the goddess had at last had her revenge.

But Clodius’ friends claimed differently. After his body had been found and brought back to Rome, the news of his murder spread quickly from crossroad to crossroad. The slums began to echo with wails of lamentation. Soon crowds were massing outside Clodius’ mansion on the Palatine. Fulvia showed them the gashed body of her husband, carefully pointing out each wound. The mob howled in misery and rage. The next day the corpse of the people’s hero was borne from the Palatine, across the Forum, and laid on the rostra. Meanwhile, in the neighbouring Senate House benches were kicked over, tables smashed, clerical records plundered. Then, on the floor of the chamber, a pyre was raised. Clodius was laid upon it. A torch was brought. More than thirty years had passed since the destruction of Jupiter’s temple on the Capitol, warning the Roman people of coming catastrophe. Now, once again, the Forum was lit a violent red. In the flickering glare battles between the partisans of Clodius and those of his murderer reached a new and intoxicating pitch of savagery. Still the flames raged, and as the Senate House crashed into blackened ruin they spread to a neighbouring monument: the Basilica Porcia. Here was where Rome’s first permanent law court had been built – by an ancestor of Cato, no less. In a spectacle loaded with pointed and deliberate symbolism, it too was consumed. That night, when Clodius’ partisans feasted in honour of their dead leader, they did so amid the ashes of the Senate’s authority.

Now at last Pompey’s moment had come. Even Cato, gazing at the charred shell of his ancestor’s monument, had to accept that. Anything was preferable to anarchy. He still could not bring himself to accept a dictatorship, but proposed as a compromise that Pompey should serve for the year as sole consul. The paradoxical nature of such an office was indication enough of the monstrous nature of the times. The Senate met in Pompey’s theatre, and on Bibulus’ motion invited the great man to rescue the Republic. Pompey obliged with brisk and military efficiency. For the first time since the civil war, armed troops were marched into Rome. The gangs of Clodius and Milo proved no match for Pompey’s legionaries. Milo himself was speedily put on trial. Since the charge was the murder of Clodius, Cicero leapt at the chance to defend him. It was his hope, in such a cause, to deliver the speech of his life. His opportunity came on the last day of the trial. That morning he crossed from his mansion on the Palatine to the law courts. Eerie and unprecedented silence cloaked the city. All the shops had been boarded up. Guards had been posted on the corner of every street. Pompey himself was stationed beside the law courts, surrounded by a wall of troops, the sun glinting off the steel of their helmets – and this in the Forum, the very heart of Rome. Cicero, taken aback by the spectacle, lost his nerve. His speech was delivered, we are told by one source, ‘without his customary assurance’.²⁶ Others claimed that he could barely stammer so much as a word. Milo was found guilty. He left that same week for exile in Marseille. Other ringleaders of the mob violence were similarly served. In the space of barely a month peace had been restored to Rome.

Even Cato had to acknowledge that Pompey had done well, though he did so with his customary gracelessness. When Pompey took him aside to thank him for his support, Cato sternly retorted that he had not been supporting Pompey, but Rome. ‘As for advice, he would happily give it in private, if asked, and if he were not asked, then he would give it anyway in public.’²⁷ Disguised as a slap in the face as this offer was, Pompey accepted it gratefully. Even since his return from the East a decade before he had been waiting for such a moment. However begrudgingly, Cato had acknowledged his status as first citizen. At long last, Pompey appeared to have power and respect together.

No wonder that when Caesar, that same new year, having racked his brains to come up with a suitable bride for his partner, had finally proposed his own great-niece Octavia, Pompey had turned down the offer. He had not meant to signal the end of his friendship by this rebuff, merely that it could not be taken for granted. Now that he had been restored to respectability in the eyes of the senatorial establishment, there were bidders for his hand who could offer more than Caesar. Pompey had been eyeing up the daughters of the crème de la crème for a while. One in particular had caught his connoisseur’s eye. The death of young Publius Crassus at Carrhae had left his wife Cornelia a widow. Beautiful and cultivated, she also happened to be exquisitely well connected. The pedigree of her father, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nascia, was sonorously reflected in the roll-call of his names. The fact that Metellus Scipio himself was a vicious nonentity, pre-eminent at nothing save the staging of pornographic floor shows, mattered not the slightest. What did matter was the fact that he was the head of the Metelli, closely related to any number of impressive patricians, and descended from the same Scipios who had defeated Hannibal and captured Carthage. Cornelia’s own delights were an added bonus. Taking a break from cleaning up the streets of Rome, Pompey decked himself out in wedding garlands. It was the fifth occasion on which he had done so. This time round he was twice the age of his new bride. He brushed aside all the predictable jeers. Married life suited him. Above all, it provided him with a salve for his grief over Julia. The happy couple were soon scandalously in love.