Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

A man in the arms of a woman such as Cornelia could know himself to be in the very bosom of the aristocracy. It was a sweet fulfilment, made all the sweeter by the fact that Cato, the man who had pronounced Pompey unworthy of his niece’s hand, had himself once been jilted by Cornelia’s mother. Old rancours ran deep, and there was no love lost between Cato and Metellus Scipio. Even so, when Pompey pronounced that the state of emergency in Rome had been brought under control and invited his father-in-law to serve as consul with him for the remainder of 52 BC, Cato could hardly object. After all, Pompey was behaving with impeccable regard for the constitution. The Republic had been sick, and now it was restored. All was just as it had been in the past.

Pompey’s fellow citizens were desperate to believe this. Even those who had long been suspicious of his ambitions now had their own reasons for acknowledging his pre-eminence. Haughty aristocrats who had seen what Pompey had been able to achieve on behalf of that grand pornographer Metellus Scipio had begun to moderate their disdain. Cato might still clap his hands over his ears whenever Pompey said anything unconstitutional, but in general, and for the first time, he was prepared to give his old opponent a hearing. And then, of course, there was Caesar. In Gaul, amid the blood and smoke of Alesia, Pompey’s partner still looked to him for friendship. Many different interests, many of them irreconcilably opposed – and yet all of them looking for support to a single person.

This was unprecedented in the history of the Republic. No wonder that Cicero found himself marvelling at Pompey’s ‘abilities and good fortune, which have enabled him to achieve what nobody else has ever done’.²⁸ Yet even as the great man exulted in his primacy, each faction competing for his favours was manoeuvring to destroy the others, and force Pompey to identify with them alone. Who was exploiting whom? This was a question that had barely begun to be resolved. Yet it would be soon enough – to the point of destruction and beyond.

Mutually Assured Destruction

The art of theatre-building did not come to an end with the construction of Pompey’s marble monster. If anything, it rose to new heights of rococo ingenuity, as ambitious noblemen competed to lay foundations not of stone but deep within the affections of the Roman people. Most extraordinary of all was a theatre built by Curio, the brilliant young intimate of Clodius. In 53 BC Curio’s father had died. Curio had been in Asia at the time, on provincial duties, but even before his return to Rome he had begun drawing up plans for a series of truly spectacular funeral games. When the theatre that had been designed to stage them was finally unveiled, the audience found to their excitement that they too were to be a feature of the show. Two different stages had been built, complete with banks of seats, both precariously balanced on a revolving pivot. Two plays could be performed simultaneously, and then, at midday, when the acting was done, there would be an immense cranking of machinery, the theatres would revolve, lock together and form a single stage. ‘This was where the gladiators would battle, even though the Roman people themselves, as they spun round in their seats, were in far greater peril than the gladiators.’ More than a century later the elder Pliny could only shake his head in astonishment at the design. ‘And yet that was not the most amazing thing!’ he exclaimed. ‘Even more incredible was the madness of the people. There they sat, perfectly content, in seats which were treacherous and liable to collapse!’²⁹

Here, it might have been thought, in a city as sensitive to omens as Rome, was a wonder pregnant with menace. To later generations, the identification of the Republic with Curio’s amphitheatre – so splendid, so unstable – must have been an obvious one to make. Indeed, it is surely the reason why the memory of it was preserved. But if any of the spectators who risked their necks clambering into the stalls were aware of the portentous nature of what they were doing, then the record of it has failed to survive. The mood of the Republic was fretful, but not apocalyptic. Why would it have been otherwise? Rome’s system of government had endured for almost five hundred years. It had won her a greatness so surpassing that not a king in the world had been able to withstand her. Above all, it gave to every citizen the measurement of himself, the reassurance that he was not a subject or a slave, but a man. A Roman could no more conceive of the Republic’s collapse than he could imagine himself an Egyptian or a Gaul. Fearful of the gods’ anger he may have been, but not to the point of dreading the impossible.

So there was no one to read in the creaking of Curio’s theatre an approaching cataclysm. Just the opposite: to the voters, it ground out a familiar rhythm. Curio had his eye on a tribunate. His theatre was designed not only to honour his dead father, but to advance his ambitions. In that cause, as had become the fashion despite the tears over Pompey’s elephants, the blood of exotic animals had to be spilled. Curio specialised in panthers, a taste he shared with Caelius, who was always badgering contacts in the provinces for more. Both men knew how important it was to cut a dash with the electorate. As Caesar had done before them, they gambled with their futures by running up monstrous debts. Once this might have branded them as lightweights. Now it marked them out as rising stars.

So too did other, more time-tested talents. The Republic still swirled as violently as it had ever done with ambitions, hatreds and intrigues, but Curio and Caelius were both skilled in negotiating such treacherous currents, knowing when to hold fast and when to tack to fresh winds. Principle rarely blinded them to personal advantage. Their own relationship was a case in point. Each could recognise a useful ally in the other, despite the fact that during the perilous days after Clodius’ murder, when the Republic had appeared on the verge of anarchy, they had been on opposite sides. Curio, Clodius’ oldest ally, had remained faithful to the memory of his dead friend, and indeed proved such a comfort to Clodius’ widow Fulvia that the two of them ended up marrying. Caelius, by contrast, had continued his feud with Clodia and her brother with implacable gusto, and in 52 BC, when he was tribune, used the full resources of his office to serve as cheerleader for Milo. A year later, however, when Caelius found himself particularly short of panthers, Curio thought nothing of slipping him twenty of his own. As it had always been, bet-hedging remained a politician’s wisest course.

Except that, on the gravest and most insoluble problem of the day, this was becoming ever more tricky. Ironically, it was Caelius himself who had brought the issue to a head. Midway through 52 the news had reached Rome of Caesar’s victory at Alesia. The city had been full of dark forebodings about the situation in Gaul, and so the realisation that war bands of vengeful barbarians would not be sweeping southwards after all was greeted with an immense outpouring of relief. Twenty days of thanksgiving were voted by the Senate, while Caelius, in his role as tribune, proposed a complementary bill of his own. By its terms Caesar was to be awarded a unique privilege: rather than being obliged to arrive at Rome in person to stand for the consulship – as he had had to do, for instance, in the previous decade – he was to have the right to run for election while remaining in Gaul. All nine of Caelius’ colleagues in the tribunate backed this proposal. The bill duly became law.

But this hardly settled the matter. Instead, it served to open a division in the Senate that was to widen with each passing month, polarising opinion in a way that was to grow steadily more dangerous, until it would finally yawn so unbridgeably that the entire Roman people would find themselves teetering on the edge of a fatal abyss. At the heart of the crisis lay the simple fact that Caesar, if he were permitted to progress seamlessly from Gaul to a second consulship, would at no stage be a private citizen. This, to many, was intolerable – for only a private citizen could be brought to trial. No sooner had Caelius’ bill been passed than Cato was fulminating against it. The criminal actions of Caesar’s first consulship had been neither forgotten nor forgiven. For almost a decade his enemies had been waiting for the opportunity to bring him to account. Now that the chance was nearing they had no intention of being denied their prey.

There were plenty who tried to reconcile the irreconcilable. Caelius, in bringing his bill, had been prompted by Cicero, who counted himself as a friend of both Caesar and Cato. Of course, too – and far more crucially – did Pompey. For a precarious few months he had succeeded in balancing the interests of his old ally and a host of Caesar’s opponents, Cato not least. Having at last won for himself the undisputed pre-eminence he had always craved, Pompey had no wish to see it threatened by having to choose between rival blocs of his supporters. Yet no matter how determinedly he closed his eyes to it, the dilemma refused go away. In the debate on Caesar’s future neither side would accept any hint of a compromise. Both believed themselves utterly, implacably in the right.

For Caesar himself, still wading through the mud and slaughter of Gaul, it was an outrage that he, a proconsul of the Roman people, should be obliged to guard his back against the machinations of petty stay-at-homes like Cato. For almost a decade he had been exerting himself titanically in the cause of the Republic – and was he now, as his reward, to face the ignominy of a trial? Milo’s conviction offered a grim precedent of what might happen to him: the Forum ringed with steel, the defence intimidated, the conviction hurried through. Once he had been found guilty in a court of law, Caesar’s great achievements would help him not a whit. To the cheering of pygmies who had never in their lives rallied an ambushed legion, or planted an eagle beyond the icy northern seas, or defeated in one battle two colossal hordes of barbarians, he would be forced into exile, to spend the rest of his life in the company of men such as Verres, his expectations withering to nothing in the sunshine of Marseille.

Yet the more that Caesar vaunted the exceptional nature of his claims, the more disgusted his many enemies became. Unspoken behind his demands lay the menace of his army, swollen by illegal levies and battle-hardened in the fire of his adventuring. If Caesar were to return home as consul, then he would have no problem in ramming through legislation that would secure farms for his veterans, and a reservoir of armed strength for himself that would put even Pompey in the shade. Rather than permit that, Cato and his allies were prepared to go to any lengths. Interminable disputes over Caesar’s command began to dominate the Senate’s every session. How many legions should he be permitted to keep? When should a successor be nominated? When should Caesar himself have to stand down? ‘You know the form,’ drawled Caelius to Cicero. ‘Some decision will be reached about Gaul. Then someone stands up and complains about it. Then someone else stands up in turn … and so it drags on – a long, elaborate game.’³⁰

Yet arcane though the debate frequently appeared, Caelius’ yawns of boredom were an affectation. He was as penetrating an analyst of folly and ambition as anyone in Rome, and he was starting to recognise what was threatening: a catastrophe so appalling as to seem almost beyond belief. What had begun as a feud of the kind that had always existed in the Republic – indeed, had formed the essence of its politics – was now spreading a contagion of bitterness and antagonism far beyond the ranks of the two rival factions. Cato, determined to destroy Caesar once and for all, was repeating his favourite tactic by spurning all hint of compromise, seeking to isolate his enemy, arraying legitimacy and the name of the Republic itself against him. Caesar, for his part, was flooding Rome with bribes, wooing and cajoling his fellow citizens with all his effortless powers of charm. Most still wished to remain neutral. It was not their quarrel. Yet such were the stakes, they could not help but be caught up on the swell and wash of the arguments. Day by day, month by month, the Roman people were dividing into two. An ill-omened phrase, rarely spoken of as a foreboding since the dark days of Sulla, began to be whispered again: civil war.

Not that anyone truly believed that this could happen. Win over Pompey and win the argument – such was the expectation. The great man himself, desperately struggling to maintain control of the situation, vacillated. Still not wishing to alienate either side, he gave to Caesar with one hand and took away with the other. The problem with this strategy, as Caelius pointed out, was that ‘he lacks the cunning to keep his real views out of sight.’³¹ Those views, by the summer of 51 BC, were coming ever more clearly into focus. Cato’s grisly warnings were having their effect. Since Caesar’s ultimate sanction was his army, this could not help but strike Pompey as a challenge to himself. Honour and vanity alike obliged him to dig in his heels. Rome’s greatest general could not appear to be nervous of the legions of Gaul. At the end of September he finally delivered an unambiguous verdict: Caesar should give up his command the following spring. This would be months before the consular elections, and provide Cato, or anyone else, with plenty of time to bring a prosecution. And what if Caesar put up a tribune to veto such a proposal and still sought to win the consulship while keeping hold of his army? Pompey was asked. The answer was softly spoken, but delivered with unmistakable menace: ‘You might as well ask, What if my son chooses to raise a stick against me?’³²

Now at last the rupture between the two old allies was in the open. Pompey, the son-in-law, had claimed the fearsome rights of a Roman father over Caesar. The conqueror of Gaul was to be treated – and presumably punished – like a rebellious child. Since this was an attack as much upon Caesar’s self-regard as upon his interests, it was doubly unforgivable. But if he were to stay in the fight, then he would need fresh supporters. Above all, he would need a tribune, a heavyweight with the nerve and spirit to stand up to proposals that now had the full muscle of Pompey behind them. Unless they could be vetoed, Caesar knew that he was finished.

But when the results of the elections for 50 BC were announced it appeared that his fortunes had taken a further turn for the worse. Ablest and most charismatic of the new tribunes was none other than Curio, reaping due reward for his spectacular theatre. He had been the darling of the Roman people for almost a decade, ever since the summer of Caesar’s consulship. Then, still in his twenties, he had dared to defy the menaces of the consul and been cheered for it in the streets. In the ensuing nine years the bad blood between the two men had worsened. As a result there could be no doubt who had most to fear from the energies of the combustible new tribune. Surely now, people began to hope, Caesar would have to back down? Surely the crisis might be abating?

That winter, as Rome shivered, it certainly appeared so. The city, it struck Caelius, was numb with cold and lethargy. Most surprisingly of all, Curio’s tribunate had nothing to show for itself. As Caelius wrote to Cicero, in a tone of half regret, ‘it’s deep frozen’. But midway through his letter he suddenly had to eat his words: ‘I take back everything I wrote above, when I said that Curio was taking things coolly – because, to be sure, he’s suddenly started turning up the temperature – and how!’³³ The news was astonishing, barely believable. Curio had swung behind his old enemy. The man who had confidently been expected to take the side of Cato and the constitutionalists had done just the opposite. Caesar had his tribune after all.

It was a sensational ambush. Caelius himself attributed his friend’s volte-face to irresponsibility, but that, as he would later recognise, was unfair. Others were to assume that Curio had been bought with Gallic gold, which was probably closer to the mark, but again did not tell the whole story. In fact, the tribune was playing a classic game. By working to outflank Cato’s obstructions, he hoped to do for Caesar what Caesar himself had done for Pompey – and to reap similar rewards. It was hardly principled, but Curio was doing nothing that had not been sanctioned by centuries of similar sharp practice.

Nor was Cato, nor was Pompey. Nor even was Caesar. Throughout the centuries of the Republic’s history, its great men had sought to win glory, and to do their enemies down. Nothing had changed over the years save the scale of opportunities on offer and the scope for mutual destruction that they had brought. To the Romans of a later age, mourning the death of their freedom, this was to be tragically clear. ‘By now,’ wrote Petronius of the Republic’s last generation, ‘the conquering Roman had the whole world in his hand, the sea, the land, the course of the stars. But still he wanted more.’³⁴ And because he wanted more, he took more; and because he took more, he wanted more. It was almost impossible for appetites so monstrous to be sated within the ancient limits of custom or morality. Pompey and Caesar, Rome’s greatest conquerors, had won resources for themselves beyond all the imaginings of previous generations. Now the consequences of such obscene power were becoming grimly apparent. Either man had the capability to destroy the Republic. Neither wished to do so, but deterrence, if it were to have any value, obliged both to prepare for the worst. Hence Caesar’s recruitment of Curio. So high were the stakes, and so finely poised the equilibrium of power, that the activities of a single tribune, Caesar hoped, might prove sufficient to tip the balance of terror – to make the difference between peace with honour and catastrophe beyond recall. So Curio trusted too.

But their enemies remained as determined as ever to call their bluff. As Curio vetoed their every effort to prise Caesar away from his command, demands began to be made of Pompey that he should make good his boasts of forcing the proconsul to back down. Pompey responded by taking to his bed. Whether his illness was diplomatic or not, it certainly convulsed Italy with anxiety. In every town, the length and breadth of the country, sacrifices were offered up for the great man’s preservation. The invalid, unsurprisingly, was gratified in the extreme. By the time he finally emerged from his sickroom, he felt a perfect confidence in his popularity. He had been given the reassurance he needed to prepare for the ultimate sanction of war. When a nervous supporter asked what forces he would be able to put into the field should Caesar do the unthinkable and march on Rome, Pompey smiled calmly and told him not to worry. ‘I only have to stamp my foot, and all over Italy legionaries and cavalry will rise up from the ground.’³⁵

But many were not so sure. To Caelius, it appeared self-evident that Caesar’s army was incomparably superior to anything that Pompey could muster. ‘In peacetime,’ he wrote to Cicero, ‘while taking part in domestic politics, it is most important to back the side that is in the right – but in times of war, the strongest.’³⁶ Nor was he alone in this cynical judgement. Behind it lay the same calculation arrived at by Curio: that support for Caesar might offer a short cut to power. Hungry for immediate pickings, an entire generation was turning away from the cause of legitimacy. Between the fast set and the senior statesmen of the Senate, draped in the dignity of their offices and years, there had always been tensions, but now, amid all the war talk, the mutual contempt was widening into something truly ominous.

A bitter election, with that snooty epitome of the establishment Domitius Ahenobarbus on one side and the young Mark Antony on the other, made it obvious to all. Amid the smog and forebodings of an oppressive summer, Hortensius had died, leaving behind him the largest private zoo in Italy, ten thousand bottles of wine, and an augurate. With the Republic seemingly lurching towards disaster, it was certainly no time to tolerate a vacancy in the augural college – for whenever Rome’s magistrates, whether by studying the flight of birds, or the pattern of lightning, or the eating habits of sacred chickens, sought to interpret the will of the gods and prescribe how best their anger could be appeased, it was the augurs who would confirm that the correct ruling had been made. Since the office was immensely prestigious, Domitius naturally regarded it as his by right. His young opponent disagreed. True, a hint of the disreputable still clung to the rake who had cohabited so outrageously with Curio and tangled with Clodius over the affections of his wife, but Antony had come a long way since the wild days of his youth. Serving in Gaul, he had covered himself in glory, and now, back in Rome, was fêted as one of Caesar’s most brilliant officers. Domitius, with the full weight of the senatorial establishment behind him, remained overwhelmingly the favourite, but Antony, at Alesia and elsewhere, had grown used to seeing off high odds. So he did again now. In a famous victory, worthy of being set beside Caesar’s own election as pontifex maximus, he won the augurate. Domitius was left incandescent with fury, and the chasm between the two factions in the Republic grew a little wider still.

It seemed by now that every skirmish thrown up in political life was having a similar effect. The vast majority of citizens who cared for neither side, or for both, were in despair. ‘I’m fond of Curio,’ wailed Cicero, ‘I wish to see Caesar honoured in the manner which is his due, and as for Pompey, I would lay down my life for him – all the same, what really counts with me is the Republic itself.’³⁷ But there was nothing that he or anyone who thought like him could do. Spokesmen for peace were increasingly dismissed as appeasers. The rival factions were embracing their doom. It was as though, peering over the edge, vertigo was tempting them to jump. The thrill of a bloodlust was ripe in the winter air, and the talk was all of war.

In December 50 BC one of the two consuls, Gaius Marcellus, travelled in the full pomp of his office to Pompey’s villa in the Alban Hills. His colleague, having begun the year as an anti-Caesarian, had been persuaded, much like Curio, and no doubt for similar motives, to switch sides – but Marcellus, spurning all overtures, had remained implacable in his hostility to Caesar. Now, with only days left in office, he felt that the time had come to put some more steel into Pompey’s backbone. Watched by an immense number of senators and a tense, excited crowd, Marcellus handed his champion a sword. ‘We charge you to march against Caesar,’ he intoned sombrely, ‘and rescue the Republic.’ ‘I will do so,’ Pompey answered, ‘if no other way can be found.’³⁸ He then took the sword, along with the command of two legions at Capua. He also set about raising fresh levies. All of which was illegal in the extreme – an embarrassment predictably made much of by Caesar’s supporters. Caesar himself, stationed menacingly at Ravenna with the 13th Legion, was brought the news by Curio, who by now had finished his term and had no wish to stay in Rome to suffer prosecution, or worse. Meanwhile, back in the capital, his place as tribune had been taken by Antony, who occupied himself throughout December by launching a series of blood-curdling attacks on Pompey and vetoing anything that moved. As the tension heightened, the deadlock remained.

Then, on 1 January 49 BC, despite the stern opposition of the new consuls, who were both, like Marcellus, virulent anti-Caesarians, Antony read out a letter to the Senate. It had been hand-delivered by Curio and penned by Caesar himself. The proconsul cast himself as the friend of peace. After a lengthy recitation of his many great achievements he proposed that both he and Pompey lay down their commands simultaneously. The Senate, nervous of the effect that this might have on public opinion, suppressed it. Metellus Scipio then stood up and dealt the death-blow to all the final, flickering hopes of compromise. He named a date by which Caesar should surrender command of his legions or be considered an enemy of the Republic. This motion was immediately put to the vote. Only two senators opposed it: Curio and Caelius. Antony, as tribune, then promptly vetoed the bill.

For the Senate, that was the final straw. On 7 January a state of emergency was proclaimed. Pompey immediately moved troops into Rome, and the tribunes were warned that their safety could no longer be guaranteed. With a typically melodramatic flourish, Antony, Curio and Caelius disguised themselves as slaves, and then, hiding in wagons, fled north towards Ravenna. There, Caesar was still waiting with his single legion. The news of Pompey’s emergency powers reached him on the tenth. Immediately, he ordered a detachment of troops to strike south, to seize the nearest town across the frontier, inside Italy. Caesar himself, however, while his men were setting out, passed the afternoon by having a bath, then attending a banquet, where he chatted with guests as though he had not a care in the world. Only at dusk did he rise from his couch. Hurrying in a carriage along dark and twisting byways, he finally caught up with his troops on the bank of the Rubicon. There was a moment’s dreadful hesitation, and then he was crossing its swollen waters into Italy, towards Rome.

No one could know it at the time, but 460 years of the free Republic were being brought to an end.

WORLD WAR

Blitzkrieg

In Gaul, against the barbarians, Caesar had preferred to stab hard and fast wherever he was least expected, no matter what the risks. Now, having taken the supreme gamble of his life, he aimed to unleash the same strategy against his fellow citizens. Rather than wait for his full complement of legions to arrive from Gaul, as Pompey had expected him to do, Caesar decided instead to rely upon the effects of terror and surprise. Beyond the Rubicon there was no one to oppose him. His agents had been busy softening up Italy with bribes. Now, the moment he appeared before them, the frontier towns opened their gates. The great trunk roads to Rome were easily secured. Still no one advanced from the capital. Still Caesar struck on south.

News of the blitzkrieg was carried to Rome upon crowds of refugees. The effect of their arrival was to send fresh refugees streaming out of the city itself. Invasions from the north stirred ancestral nightmares in the Republic. Cicero, as he followed the reports of Caesar’s progress with obsessive horror, wondered, ‘Is it a general of the Roman people we are talking about, or Hannibal?’¹ But there were other ghosts abroad too, from a more recent period of history. Farmers working in the fields beside the tomb of Marius reported sightings of the grim old general, risen from his sepulchre; while in the middle of the Campus Martius, where Sulla’s corpse had been consumed, his spectre was glimpsed, intoning ‘prophecies of doom’.² Gone was the war fever, so glad and confident only a few days before. Panicky senators, who had been assured by Pompey that victory would be a walkover, were now starting to calculate whether their names might not soon be appearing on Caesar’s proscription lists. The Senate rose and, as one body, besieged their generalissimo. One senator openly accused Pompey of having deceived the Republic and tempted it into disaster. Another, Favonius, a close friend of Cato, jeered at him to stamp his foot and produce the legions and cavalry he had promised.

But Pompey had already given up on Rome. The Senate was issued with an evacuation order. Anyone staying behind, Pompey warned, would be regarded as a traitor. With that he headed south, leaving the capital to its fate. His ultimatum made final and irreparable the schism in the Republic. Every civil war cuts through families and friendships, but Roman society had always been especially subtle in its loyalties, and contemptuous of brute divisions. For many citizens, a choice between Caesar and Pompey remained as impossible as ever. For some, it was particularly cruel. As a result all eyes were upon them. What, for instance, was a man such as Marcus Junius Brutus to do? Earnest, dutiful and deep-thinking, yet heavily committed to both rivals, his judgement would carry special weight. Which way would Marcus Brutus choose to leap?

There was much to encourage him into Caesar’s camp. His mother, Servilia, had been the great love of Caesar’s life, and it was even claimed that Brutus himself was their love child. Whatever the truth of that rumour, Brutus’ legal father had been one of the young Pompey’s many victims during the first civil war, and so it was widely assumed that he was bound to favour the old flame of his mother over the murderer of her husband. But Pompey, once the ‘teenage butcher’, was now the champion of the Republic, and Brutus, an intellectual of rare probity and honour, could not bring himself to abandon the cause of legitimacy. Attached to Caesar he may have been, but he was even closer to Cato, who was both his uncle and his father-in-law. Brutus obeyed Pompey’s orders. He abandoned Rome. So too, after a night of havering and hand-wringing, did most of the Senate. Only the barest rump remained. Never before had the city been so emptied of its magistrates. Barely a week had passed since Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, and already the world had been turned upside down.

Pompey, of course, could argue that there were sound military reasons for the surrender of the capital – and so there were. Nevertheless, it was a tragic and fatal mistake. The Republic could not endure as an abstraction. Its vitality was nourished by the streets and public places of Rome, by the smoke rising from age-blackened temples, by the rhythms of elections, year on year on year. Uprooted, how could the Republic remain true to the will of the gods, and how were the wishes of the Roman people to be known? By fleeing the city the Senate had cut itself off from all those – the vast majority – who could not afford to pack up and leave their homes. As a result, the shared sense of community that had bound even the poorest citizen to the ideals of the state was betrayed. No wonder that the great nobles, abandoning their ancestral homes, dreaded looters and the fury of the slums.

Perhaps, if the war proved to be as short as Pompey had promised it would be, then none of this would matter – but it was already becoming clear that only Caesar had any hope of a lightning victory. Even as Pompey retreated south through Italy his pursuer was gathering pace. It seemed that the scattered legions summoned to the defence of the Republic might suffer the same fate as Spartacus’ army, pinned down in the peninsula’s heel. Only complete evacuation could spare them such a calamity. The Senate began to contemplate the unthinkable: that it should reconvene abroad. Provinces had already been allocated to its key leaders: Sicily to Cato, Syria to Metellus Scipio, Spain to Pompey himself. Henceforward, it appeared, the arbiters of the Republic’s fate were to rule not in the city that had bestowed their rank upon them, but as warlords amid distant and sinister barbarians. Their power would be sanctioned by force, and force alone. How, then, were they different to Caesar? How, whichever side won, was the Republic to be restored?

Even those most identified with the cause of the establishment showed themselves tormented by this question. Cato, contemplating the results of his greatest and most ruinous gamble, did nothing for his followers’ morale by putting on mourning and bewailing the news of every military engagement, victory as well as defeat. Neutrals, of course, lacked even the consolation of knowing that the Republic was being destroyed in a good cause. Cicero, having obediently abandoned Rome on Pompey’s orders, found himself disoriented to the point of hysteria by his absence from the capital. For weeks he could do nothing save write plaintive letters to Atticus, asking him what he should do, where he should go, whom he should support. He regarded Caesar’s followers as a gang of cutthroats, and Pompey as criminally incompetent. Cicero was no soldier, but he could see with perfect clarity what a catastrophe the abandonment of Rome had been, and blamed it for the collapse of everything he held dear, from property prices to the Republic itself. ‘As it is, we wander about like beggars with our wives and children, all our hopes dependent upon a man who falls dangerously ill once a year, and yet we were not even expelled but summoned from our city!’³ Always the same anguish, the same bitterness, bred of the wound that had never healed. Cicero already knew what his fellow senators were soon to learn: that a citizen in exile was barely a citizen at all.

Nor, with Rome abandoned, was there anywhere else to make a stand. The one attempt to hold Caesar ended in debacle. Domitius Ahenobarbus, whose immense capacity for hatred embraced Pompey and Caesar in equal measure, refused point blank to retreat. He was inspired less by any grand strategic vision than by stupidity and pig-headedness. With Caesar sweeping through central Italy, Domitius decided to bottle himself up in the crossroads town of Corfinium. This was the same Corfinium that the Italian rebels had made their capital forty years before, and memories of that great struggle were not yet entirely the stuff of history. Enfranchised they may have been, but there were plenty of Italians who still felt themselves alienated from Rome. The cause of the Republic meant little to them – but not so that of Caesar. After all, he was the heir of Marius, that great patron of the Italians – and the enemy of Pompey, the partisan of Sulla. Old hatreds, flaring back to life, doomed Domitius’ stand. Certainly, Corfinium had no intention of perishing in his defence: no sooner had Caesar appeared before its walls than it was begging to surrender. Domitius’ raw levies, confronted by an army that by now comprised five crack legions, were quick to agree. Envoys were sent to Caesar, who accepted their capitulation gracefully. Domitius raged, but in vain.

Hauled before Caesar by his own officers, he begged for death. Caesar refused. Instead he sent Domitius on his way. This was only seemingly a gesture of mercy. For a citizen, there could be no more unspeakable humiliation than to owe one’s life to the favour of another. Domitius, for all that he had been spared to fight another day, left Corfinium diminished and emasculated. It would be unfair to dismiss Caesar’s clemency as a mere tool of policy – Domitius, if their positions had been reversed, would surely have had Caesar put to death – but it served his purposes well enough. For not only did it satisfy his own ineffable sense of superiority, but it helped to reassure neutrals everywhere that he was no second Sulla. Even his bitterest enemies, if they only submitted, could have the assurance that they would be pardoned and spared. Caesar had no plans for proscription lists to be posted in the Forum.

The point was jubilantly taken. Few citizens had the pride of Domitius. The levies he had recruited, to say nothing of the people whose town he had occupied, had no hesitation in rejoicing at their conqueror’s leniency. News of the ‘Pardon of Corfinium’ spread fast. There would be no popular uprising against Caesar now, no chance that Italy would swing behind Pompey and come suddenly to his rescue. With Domitius’ recruits having crossed to the enemy, the army of the Republic was now even more denuded than it had been, and its sole stronghold was Brundisium, the great port, the gateway to the East. Here Pompey remained, frantically commandeering ships, preparing for the crossing to Greece. He knew that he could not risk open battle with Caesar, not yet – and Caesar knew that if only he could capture Brundisium, he would be able to finish off the war at a stroke.

And so now, for both sides, began a desperate race against time. Speeding south from Corfinium, Caesar was brought the news that half of the enemy’s army had already sailed, under the command of the two consuls, but that the other half, under Pompey, still waited crammed inside the port. There they would have to remain, holed up, until the fleet returned from Greece. Caesar, arriving outside Brundisium, immediately ordered his men to sail pontoons to the harbour mouth and throw a breakwater across the gap. Pompey responded by having three-storey towers built on the decks of merchant ships, then sending them across the harbour to rain missiles down on Caesar’s engineers. For days the struggle continued, a desperate tumult of slingshot, heaving timbers and flames. Then, with the breakwater still unfinished, sails were spotted out to sea. Pompey’s fleet was returning from Greece. Breaking through the harbour mouth, it docked successfully, and the evacuation of Brundisium was at last able to begin. The operation was conducted with Pompey’s customary efficiency. As twilight deepened the oars of his transport fleet began to plash across the harbour’s waters. Caesar, warned by sympathisers inside the city, ordered his men to storm the walls – but they broke into Brundisium too late. Out through the narrow bottleneck left them by the siegeworks, Pompey’s ships were slipping into the open night. With them went Caesar’s last hope of a speedy resolution to the war. It was barely two and a half months since he had crossed the Rubicon.

When dawn came it illumined an empty sea. The sails of Pompey’s fleet had vanished. The future of the Roman people now waited not in their own city, nor even in Italy, but beyond the still and mocking horizon, in barbarous countries far from the Forum or the Senate House or the voting pens.

As the Republic tottered, so the tremors could be felt throughout the world.

Pompey’s Victory Feast

The East, unlike Rome, was familiar with kings. The stern subtleties of republicanism meant little to people who could conceive of no form of government save monarchy, and might on occasion even worship their sovereigns as divine. To the Romans, naturally, this superstition appeared contemptible. All the same, their magistrates had long been awarded their own elevated places in the pantheons of their subjects: their praises had been wafted to the heavens upon dense clouds of incense, their images placed in the temples of strange gods. For the citizen of a republic in which jealousy and suspicion accompanied every parade of greatness, these were heady pleasures – but also perilous ones. Rivals back in Rome were quick to denounce any hint of regal delusion. ‘Remember you are a man’* – this was the warning whispered by a slave into Pompey’s ear at the moment of his most godlike felicity, when the conqueror of the East had ridden in his triumph for the third time through Rome. His enemies, however, had been unwilling to leave a message so vital to the future health of the Republic merely to a slave. Such had been their envy of Pompey that they had deployed all their machinations against him, and thereby driven him into the arms of Caesar. Now those same enemies were his allies in exile. Huddled in Thessalonica, the Senate had to try to swallow its resentment of Pompey’s godlike reputation. After all, they needed it to get them back home.

Fortunately for his cause, the credit of the new Alexander still held good. Even as he stripped the Eastern provinces bare of legions, Pompey sent out imperious summonses to the various potentates he had settled or confirmed on their thrones. The enthusiasm with which these client kings rallied to him suggested that it was Pompey, rather than the Republic, who had been keeping the gorgeous East in fee. Joining the legions of citizen soldiers in Greece were any number of bizarre-looking auxiliaries, led by princes with glamorous and exotically un-Roman names: Deiotarus of Galatia, Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia, Antiochus of Commagene. No wonder that Pompey, to whose training camp near Thessalonica these panjandrums flocked, began to appear in the light less of a Roman proconsul than of an Eastern king of kings.

Or so Domitius sneered. It was a typically abusive insult from a man whose defeat at Corfinium had done nothing to improve his temper. Yet it struck a chord. A whiff of the Oriental had long attached itself to the great man. Behind his back Cicero had once called him ‘Sampsiceramus’, a barbarously syllabled name suitable to a Persian despot. But this had been satire, and affectionately meant. Now, fretting miserably still in Campania, Cicero no longer saw the joke. It seemed to him that the champion of the Republic was growing altogether too Mithridatic for comfort. He confessed to Atticus that Pompey had revealed to him his strategy for bringing Caesar to his knees, and that it was a terrible one. The provinces were to be occupied; the grain supplies cut off; Italy left to starve. Then carnage. ‘From the very first, Pompey’s plan has been to plunder the whole world, and the seas too, to whip up barbarian kings into a frenzy, to land armed savages on our Italian shores, and to mobilise vast armies.’⁴ Here, from the pen of the Republic’s most eloquent spokesman, was an echo of prophecies at least a century old. Cicero’s imaginings had caught an apocalyptic fever long endemic among Rome’s subject peoples. Had not the Sibyl foretold that Italy would be raped by her own sons? And Mithridates himself that a great monarch armed with the dominion of the world would emerge triumphant from the East? No wonder, then, when men back in Italy heard news of Pompey’s preparations that they shuddered, despairing of the Republic.

Yet fear of one warlord did little to bolster the image of the other. True, Caesar had a genius for propaganda: he had succeeded brilliantly in quashing fears that he might be planning a bloodbath, and he was assiduous in identifying his own rights with those of a traduced and outraged people. Even so, his mastery of spin could not obscure the fact that he was guilty of the highest treason. In late March, when Caesar finally entered Rome, he found the city sullen and unwelcoming. No matter how many doles of grain he promised the Roman people, they refused to be charmed. The rump of the Senate left in the capital was even less accommodating. When Caesar formally summoned them to hear his self-justifications, hardly anyone showed up.

From those few who had appeared Caesar demanded the right to seize Rome’s emergency funds. After all, he pointed out, there was no longer any need to fear a Gallic invasion, and who could be more deserving of the treasure than himself, the conqueror of Gaul? The senators, cowed and nervous, appeared ready to give in. Then a tribune, Caecilius Metellus, had the nerve to impose his veto. Caesar’s patience gave out. No defence of the rights of the people now. Instead, troops entered the Forum, the temple of Saturn was broken open, the public treasure was seized. When the stubborn Metellus persisted in trying to block this sacrilege Caesar lost his temper again. He warned the tribune to stand aside or be cut down. For nine years Caesar had been accustomed to having his every order obeyed, and he did not have the time or the temperament to moderate this habit of command now. Metellus stood aside. Caesar took the gold.

It was with relief that he returned, after two frustrating weeks in Rome, to his army. As usual he was in a hurry to press on. There were Pompeian legions active in Spain, a fresh campaign to be won. Behind him, in charge of the fractious capital, he left an amenable praetor, Marcus Lepidus. The Senate was completely bypassed. The fact that Lepidus himself was of the very bluest blood, as well as being an elected magistrate, did little to disguise the unconstitutional nature of this appointment. Naturally, there was outrage. Caesar ignored it. The appearance of legality mattered to him, but not so much as the reality of power.

For those who were not Caesar, however, for those who relied upon the law as the bulwark of their liberty and the guarantor of their traditions, all was now confusion. What was an honourable citizen to do? No one could be sure. Old route maps were proving to be treacherous guides. Civil war made of the Republic a disorienting labyrinth, one in which familiar highways might turn suddenly into culs-de-sac, and cherished landmarks into piles of rubble. Cicero, for instance, having finally screwed up the courage to scuttle for Pompey’s camp, still found himself lost. Cato, taking him to one side, told him that his coming had been a terrible mistake and that he would have been ‘more useful to his country and friends staying at home, and remaining neutral’.⁵ Even Pompey, when he found out that Cicero’s only contributions to the war effort were defeatist witticisms, publicly wished that he would go over to the enemy. Instead, Cicero sat in lugubrious impotence and moped.

But such despair was the privilege of a wealthy intellectual. Few citizens could afford to indulge it. Most sought other ways of making order out of the chaos of the times. There was nothing more upsetting to a Roman than to feel deprived of fellowship, of a sense of community, and rather than endure it he would go to any extreme. But in a civil war to what could a citizen pledge his loyalty? Not his city, nor the altars of his ancestors, nor the Republic itself, for these were claimed as the inheritance of both sides. But he could attach himself to the fortunes of a general, and be certain of finding comradeship in the ranks of that general’s army, and identity in the reflected glory of the general’s name. This was why the legions of Gaul had been willing to cross the Rubicon. What, after nine years’ campaigning, were the traditions of the distant Forum to them, compared to the camaraderie of the army camp? And what was the Republic, compared to their general? There was no one capable of inspiring a more passionate devotion in his troops than Caesar. Amid all the confusion of war it had become perhaps the surest measure of his greatness. Arriving in Spain to take on three veteran Pompeian armies in the summer of 49 BC, he was able to push his soldiers to the extremes of exhaustion and suffering, so that, within months, the enemy had been utterly vanquished. No wonder, when backed by such steel, that Caesar dared to scorn the limits placed on other citizens, and even sometimes those on flesh and blood. ‘Your spirit’, Cicero would later tell him, ‘has never been content within the narrow confines which nature has imposed upon us.’⁶ But nor were the spirits of the men who followed his star: his legions, he boasted, ‘could tear down the heavens themselves’.⁷

Here, in the mingling of the souls of Caesar and his army, was the glimpse of a new order. Ties of mutual loyalty had always provided Roman society with its fabric. So they continued to do in time of civil war, but increasingly purged of old complexities and subtleties. Simpler to follow the blast of a trumpet than the swirl of contradictory obligations that had always characterised civilian life. Yet these same obligations, comprised as they were of centuries of taboos and traditions, were not lightly to be set aside. Without them the Republic, at least as it had been constituted for centuries, would die. The checks and balances that had always served to temper the Romans’ native love of glory, and divert it into courses beneficial to their city, might soon fall away. An ancient inheritance of customs and laws might be forever lost. Already, in the first months of the civil war, the ruinous consequences of such a catastrophe could be glimpsed. Political life still subsisted, but as a grisly parody of itself. The arts of persuasion were increasingly being abandoned as resorts to violence and intimidation took their place. The ambitions of magistrates, no longer dependent upon votes, could now be paid for with their fellow citizens’ blood.

No wonder that many of Caesar’s partisans, freed of the restraints and inhibitions of tiresome convention, should have grown intoxicated by a world in which it appeared that there were no limits to what they might achieve. But some reached out too far, too fast – and paid the price. Curio, as dashing and impetuous as ever, led two legions to disaster in Africa; disdaining to flee, he died alongside his men, who perished packed so tightly around him that their corpses were left standing like sheaves of corn in a field. Caelius, still fatally addicted to intrigue, returned to his political roots and attempted to force through Catiline’s old programme of cancelling debts. When he was expelled from Rome he raised a pro-Pompeian revolt in the countryside, only to be captured and killed; a squalid end. Antony, alone of the three friends who had fled to Caesar, managed not to stumble. This reflected not any great sure-footedness but rather a preoccupation with other concerns. Even though Caesar had left him in command of Italy, Antony devoted most of his energies to billeting a harem of actresses on senators, vomiting in the popular assembly, or – a favourite party trick – dressing up as the wine god Dionysus and driving a chariot hitched to lions. Yet in the field there was no more natural soldier, and Caesar could forgive steel and élan any amount of vulgarity. Hence Antony’s rapid promotion. He was an officer worthy of the men he commanded. When Caesar finally took the fight to Pompey in early 48 BC, crossing the Adriatic in the dead of winter, Antony dodged storms and the Pompeian fleet to bring him four extra legions as reinforcements. As the two rival armies sparred nervously with each other, jabbing here, feinting there, he was always in the thick of the action, dashing, tireless, the most glamorous and discussed man on either side.

But something of the monstrous and sinister energy of their general appeared to have imbued all of Caesar’s soldiers. It was as though, like the spirits of the dead, they could subsist on the lifeblood of their foes. Caesar’s old adversary Marcus Bibulus, in command of Pompey’s Adriatic fleet, had ‘slept out on board ship, even in the bitterness of winter, pushing himself to the limits, refusing to delegate, anything to get to grips with his enemy’,⁸ but still Caesar had succeeded in running his blockade, and had left the shattered Bibulus to expire of a fever. When Pompey, in the war of attrition that followed, aimed to starve his opponents into submission, Caesar’s legions dug up roots and baked them into loaves. These they flung over the enemy barricades as symbols of defiance. No wonder that Pompey’s men found themselves ‘terrified of the ferocity and toughness of their enemy, who seemed more like a species of wild animal than men’;⁹ nor that their general, when he was shown one of the loaves baked by Caesar’s soldiers, ordered the news of it suppressed.

But Pompey himself, in private, was reassured. He knew that no men, not even Caesar’s, could subsist on roots for ever. Backed by Cato, who continued to mourn the death of every citizen, no matter from which side, he waited for Caesar’s army to fall to pieces. His strategy appeared to be paying off when Caesar in July 48 BC, bruised by a stinging reversal in the no man’s land between the two armies, suddenly abandoned his position on the Adriatic coast and marched east. Now was the moment when Pompey, had he truly been the tyrant of Cicero’s forebodings, could have sailed for Italy unopposed – but he preferred to spare his native land the horrors of invasion. Instead, he too abandoned his fortifications on the coast. Leaving only a small garrison behind under the command of Cato, he set off eastwards after Caesar. Dogging his adversary’s every twist and turn, he emerged from the wilds of the Balkans into northern Greece. Here, around the city of Pharsalus, was flat, open land, perfect for a battle. Caesar was desperate to force a decisive engagement, and drew up his legions within sight of Pompey’s camp. Pompey refused to take the bait. He knew that in everything that counted – money, food supplies, support of the natives – time was on his side. For days Caesar continued to offer battle. For days Pompey remained within his camp.

But in his council of war tempers were fraying. The senators in Pompey’s train, impatient for action, wanted Caesar and his army wiped out. What was wrong with their generalissimo? Why would he not fight? The answer was all too readily to hand, bred of decades of suspicion and resentment: ‘They complained that Pompey was addicted to command, and took pleasure in treating former consuls and praetors as though they were slaves.’¹⁰ So wrote his not unsympathetic adversary, who could give orders to his subordinates as he pleased and not be jeered at for it. But this was because Caesar, whatever he pretended otherwise, was not fighting as the champion of the Republic. Pompey was. To him, it was a title that meant everything. Now his colleagues, as jealous of overweening greatness as they had always been, demanded that he demonstrate his fitness to lead them by bowing to the wishes of the majority – let him crush Caesar once and for all! Pompey, reluctantly, gave way. The orders went out. Battle was to be joined the following day. Pompey the Great, by staking his own and the Republic’s future upon a single throw, had finally proved himself a good citizen.

But that night, as his fellow senators ordered victory banquets prepared and decked their tents with laurel, and quarrelled over who should inherit Caesar’s high priesthood, Pompey had a dream. He saw himself entering his great theatre on the Campus Martius, climbing the steps that led to the temple of Venus, and there, to the cheers and applause of the Roman people, dedicating the spoils of all his many victories to the goddess. It was enough to make him wake up in a cold sweat. Other men might have been cheered by such a vision, but Pompey remembered that Caesar was descended from Venus, and so he dreaded that all his laurels and greatness were on the point of being lost to him for ever, and becoming his rival’s.

And so it proved. The next morning, despite outnumbering the enemy more than two to one, it was Pompey’s army that was shattered and rolled back. Their opponents had been ordered not to throw their javelins, but to keep them as spears, aiming and stabbing them at the faces of the enemy cavalry, who were noblemen all, and vain of their good looks. Caesar, once the dandy nonpareil himself, had formulated the perfect tactic. Pompey’s cavalry turned and fled. Next, his loosely armed slingers and archers were cut down. Domitius, leading the left wing, was killed as his legions buckled. Caesar’s men, outflanking Pompey’s line of battle, then attacked from the rear. By midday the battle was over. That evening it was Caesar who sat down in Pompey’s tent and ate the victory meal prepared by Pompey’s chef, off Pompey’s silver plate.

But as twilight deepened and stars began to blaze in the burning August night, he rose and returned to the battlefield. All around him were piles of Roman dead, and the cries of the wounded echoed across the plain of Pharsalus. ‘They were the ones who wanted this,’¹¹ said Caesar, in mingled bitterness and grief, surveying the slaughter-ground. But he was wrong. No one had wanted the slaughter. That was the tragedy. Nor was it concluded yet. Caesar’s victory had been shattering, but the agony of the Republic appeared no nearer to a resolution. Rome and the world had fallen into the conqueror’s hands. So it seemed. But what was he to do with them? What could he do? After the cataclysm, how and what was Caesar to rebuild?

To the remnants of Pompey’s army, he displayed his celebrated clemency. Of those who accepted it, no one gave him greater joy than Marcus Brutus. After the battle Caesar had ordered a special search to be made for the son of his old flame, fearing for his safety. Once Brutus had been found unscathed, he was welcomed into the ranks of Caesar’s most intimate advisers. This was an appointment made of personal affection, but also calculation. Brutus was a widely respected man, and Caesar hoped that his recruitment might encourage other, more die-hard opponents to seek a similar reconciliation. He would not be entirely disappointed. Cicero, who had not been at Pharsalus, having stayed behind with Cato on the Adriatic coast, was one of those who decided that the war was as good as over. It almost cost him a lynching – only the intervention of Cato prevented him from being run through by a Pompeian sword. Cato himself, naturally, refused to countenance any thought of surrender. Instead, embarking with his garrison, he set sail for Africa. This alone ensured that the war would continue. As a mark of his indomitability, Cato announced that not only would he continue to grow his hair and beard in mourning, but that he would never again lie down to eat. For a Roman, this was a grim resolution indeed.

And then, of course, there was Pompey. He too remained on the loose. After Pharsalus he had galloped out of the back gates of his camp to the Aegean coast, and from there, avoiding the bounty-hunters who were already buzzing on his trail, commandeered a ship to take him to Mitylene. It was here that he had left Cornelia, in the shadow of its theatre, the model for his own, and a reminder of happier days. Now, wounded by his first taste of defeat, Pompey needed the comfort that only his wife could provide. She did not disappoint. Her father the pornographer may have been a disgrace to his ancestors, but Cornelia, when brought the news of Pharsalus, knew precisely what was expected of her. A swoon, a wiping away of tears, a run through the streets of Mitylene, and Cornelia was in her husband’s arms. Pompey, a seasoned hand at playing the antique hero, was jolted by her performance into giving one of his own: a stern lecture on the importance of never abandoning hope. He may even have believed it. Yes, a battle had been lost – but not the East, and therefore not the war. True, many of the kings who owed Pompey their thrones had been at Pharsalus and either perished or surrendered – but not all. One in particular had been absent, and he was the ruler of the kingdom in the Mediterranean that was the richest in money, provisions and ships. Furthermore, he was only a boy, and his sister, who wanted the throne for herself, was in open rebellion against him, leaving his country easy meat for the master of the East. Or so Pompey hoped. The order was given. His small fleet headed south. Barely a month after Pharsalus, Pompey moored off the flat coast of Egypt.

Emissaries were sent to the King. After a few days spent bobbing at anchor off the sand bars, on 28 September 48 BC Pompey saw a small fishing boat rowing towards his ship across the shallows. He was hailed in Latin, then a second time in Greek, and invited to board the boat. Pompey did so, having first embraced Cornelia and kissed her goodbye. As he was rowed towards the shore he attempted to engage his companions in conversation, but no one would answer him. Unsettled, Pompey looked towards the shore. There he could see the King, Ptolemy XIII, a boy dressed in his diadem and purple robes, waiting. Pompey was comforted. When he felt the keel of the boat run against the sand he rose to his feet. As he did so, suddenly, a Roman renegade drew a sword and ran him through the back. More blades were drawn. The blows rained down. ‘And Pompey, drawing his toga over his face with both hands, endured them all, nor did he say or do anything unworthy, only gave a faint groan.’¹² And so perished Pompey the Great.

Cornelia, stranded on the deck of the trireme, saw it all. But there was nothing she or any of the crew could do, not even when they saw the Egyptians decapitate the man who had so recently been the greatest in the Roman Republic, and leave his naked body as jetsam on the shore. Instead, his followers had to turn and escape to open sea, leaving only one of Pompey’s freedmen, who had accompanied his former master in the fishing boat, to prepare a pyre. In this labour, according to Plutarch’s weird and haunting account, he happened to be joined by an old soldier, a veteran of Pompey’s first campaigns; and together the two men completed their pious task. Once the body had been burned a stone cairn was raised to mark the site, but the dunes soon engulfed it, and the memory of it was lost. Nothing beside remained. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sand stretched far away.

The Queen of Cosmopolis

The coastline of the Nile Delta had always been treacherous. Low-lying and featureless, it offered nothing to help a sailor find his way. Even so, navigators who approached Egypt were not entirely bereft of guidance. At night, far distant from its shore, a dot of light flickered low in the southern sky. By day it could be seen for what it was: not a star, but a great lantern, set upon a tower, visible from miles out to sea. This was the Pharos, not only the tallest building ever built by the Greeks, but also, thanks to its endless recycling on tourist trinkets, the most instantly recognisable. A triumph of vision and engineering, the great lighthouse served as the perfect symbol for what it advertised: megalopolis – the most stupendous place on earth.

Even Roman visitors had to acknowledge that Alexandria was something special. When Caesar, three days after Pompey’s murder, sailed past the island on which the Pharos stood, he was arriving at a city larger,* more cosmopolitan and certainly far more beautiful than his own. If Rome, shabby and labyrinthine, stood as a monument to the rugged virtues of the Republic, then Alexandria bore witness to what a king could achieve. But not just any king. The tomb of Alexander the Great still stood talisman-like in the city he had founded, and the street plan, a gridded lattice lined with gleaming colonnades, was recognisably the same as that mapped out three centuries earlier by the conquering Macedonian, to the roar of the lonely sea. Now, where once there had been nothing except for sand and wheeling marsh birds, there stretched a landscape of exquisite artificiality. Here was the first city ever to have numbered addresses. Its banks oiled the commerce of East and West alike, its freight terminals churned with the trade of the world. Its celebrated library boasted seven hundred thousand scrolls and had been built in pursuit of a sublime fantasy: that every book ever written might be gathered in one place. There were even slot machines and automatic doors. Everything in Alexandria was a superlative. No wonder that Cicero, who regarded anywhere that was not Rome as ‘squalid obscurity’,¹³ should have made an exception for the one city that rivalled his own as the centre of the world. ‘Yes,’ he confessed, ‘I dream, and have long dreamed, of seeing Alexandria.’¹⁴

He was not the only Roman to be haunted by fantasies of the city. Egypt was a land of unrivalled fertility, and the proconsul who conquered Alexandria would have the bread-basket of the Mediterranean in his hands. This was a prospect that had long served to poison the already venomous swirl of Roman politics, breeding endless machinations and bribery scandals – yet no one, not even Crassus, not even Pompey, had succeeded in securing an Egyptian command. By unwritten consent, a prize so dazzling was a prize too far. In the view of most citizens it was safer and just as profitable to leave the ruling dynasty to administer the costs of its own exploitation. A succession of monarchs had played the role of the Republic’s poodle to perfection: secure enough to squeeze their subjects dry on behalf of their patrons, weak enough never to present the slightest threat to Rome. On such a humiliating basis was the last independent kingdom of the Greeks, originally founded by a general of Alexander and once the greatest power in the East, permitted to limp along.

But the kings of Egypt were nothing if not survivors. The Ptolemy who had watched Pompey being butchered in the surf was the namesake of a long line of monarchs who had always been prepared to swallow any indignity and perpetrate any outrage to keep a hold on power. To the greed, viciousness and sensuality that had characterised all the Greek dynasties in the East, the Ptolemies had added their own refinement, derived from Egypt’s pharaonic past: habitual incest. The effects of their inbreeding could be seen not only in the murderous quality of the Ptolemies’ palace intrigues, but also in a decadence exceptional even by the standards of contemporary royalty. The Romans openly regarded the Ptolemies as monstrosities, and saw it as their republican duty to rub this in at every opportunity. If the king were gross and effete, then visiting proconsuls would take delight in forcing him to lumber through the streets of Alexandria, wobbling in his diaphanous robes as he sweated to keep up. Other Romans found more vivid ways of expressing their scorn. Cato, called upon by a Ptolemy while he was administering Cyprus, had greeted the King of Egypt amid the after-effects of a laxative, and spent the entire audience sitting on the lavatory.

So it was that Caesar, arriving in the middle of a dynastic death-struggle with barely four thousand men, more than made up in prejudices what he lacked in troops. The contemptibility of the Ptolemies was confirmed for him from the moment he stepped ashore. There, a welcoming gift on the harbour quay, was Pompey’s pickled head. Caesar wept: no matter how relieved he may secretly have felt at the removal of his adversary, he was disgusted by his son-in-law’s fate, and even more so when he discovered the full background to the crime.

For Pompey the Great, it emerged, had been the victim of a sinister backstairs cabal, comprising Ptolemy’s chief ministers, a eunuch, a mercenary and an academic. Nothing, to Caesar’s mind, could have been more offensively un-Roman. Yet the brains behind the crime, Pothinus, the eunuch, was presuming on his gratitude, and confidently expecting him to back the King in the war against his sister. Instead, trapped in Alexandria by adverse winds, Caesar immediately started behaving as though he were a king himself. Needing somewhere to stay, he naturally chose the royal palace, a vast, fortified complex of buildings that over the centuries had spread and spread, until it now covered almost a third of the city – another of Alexandria’s superlatives. From this stronghold Caesar began to issue exorbitant financial demands, and announced, graciously, that he was prepared to settle the civil war between Ptolemy and his sister – not as a partisan, but as a referee. He ordered both siblings to disband their armies and meet him in Alexandria. Ptolemy, without disbanding so much as a soldier, was persuaded by Pothinus to return to the palace. Meanwhile, his sister, Cleopatra, with no free passage to the capital, remained stranded beyond Ptolemy’s lines.

But then, one evening, through the deepening shadows of an Alexandrian twilight, a small boat sneaked up to a jetty beside the palace. A single Sicilian merchant clambered out, carrying on his shoulder a carpet in a bag. Once this had been smuggled into Caesar’s presence it was unrolled to reveal the unexpected, but bewitching, sight of Cleopatra. Caesar, as the Queen had gambled he would be, was delighted by this coup de théâtre. Making an impression had never been a problem for her. While she may not have been the beauty of legend – she appears, from her coins at least, to have been somewhat scrawny and hook-nosed – her resources of seductiveness were infinite. ‘Her sex appeal, together with the charm of her conversation, and the charisma evident in everything she said or did, made her, quite simply, irresistible,’¹⁵ wrote Plutarch. Who, looking at Cleopatra’s track-record, can doubt it? Not that she was given to sleeping around; far from it. Her favours were the most exclusive in the world. Power, for Cleopatra, was the only aphrodisiac. The female of the Ptolemaic species had always been deadlier than the male: intelligent, ruthless, ambitious, strong-willed. Now, in the person of Cleopatra, all these fierce qualities met and were distilled. As such, she was exactly Caesar’s type: after more than a decade of soldiering, intelligent female company must have come as a rare pleasure. Of course, it also helped that Cleopatra was only twenty-one. Caesar bedded her that very night.

When Ptolemy found out about his sister’s conquest he was thrown into a violent tantrum. He flounced out into the streets, tossing his diadem down into the dust and screaming for his subjects to rally to his defence. The inhabitants of Alexandria were much given to rioting, and Caesar’s high-handed demands for money had already done little for his popularity. Now, when Ptolemy asked the mob to attack the Romans, it obliged enthusiastically. The hated foreigners were besieged in the palace, and so threatened did Caesar’s position become that he was obliged not only to recognise Ptolemy as joint monarch with Cleopatra, but also to cede Cyprus back to the pair of them. Even so, such concessions did little to ease him out of his embarrassing scrape. A few weeks into the siege and the rioters were joined by Ptolemy’s entire army, some twenty thousand strong. Caesar found his situation going from bad to desperate. Trapped in the hot-house of an Egyptian palace, surrounded by treacherous eunuchs and incestuous royals, he was completely cut off from the outside world. Far beyond the light cast by the flashing Pharos, the Republic was still at war with itself – yet Caesar could not get so much as a letter smuggled through to Rome.

For the next five months the terrible exploits of his previous campaigns were replayed as farce. Burning the Egyptian fleet in the harbour, the bibliophile Caesar accidentally set fire to warehouses crammed with priceless books;* attempting to secure the Pharos, he was forced to jump ship and abandon his general’s cloak to the enemy. Despite these embarrassments, however, Caesar succeeded in retaining control of both the palace and the harbour – and stamped his authority in other ways too. Not only did he have the scheming Pothinus put to death, but he impregnated Cleopatra, an act of king-making to trump anything achieved by Pompey. By March 47 BC, when reinforcements finally arrived in Egypt, the Queen was visibly swelling with the proof of Caesar’s favour. Ptolemy, panicking, fled Alexandria. Weighed down by his golden armour, he drowned in the Nile – a convenient accident that left Cleopatra unchallenged on her throne. Caesar had backed a winner once again.

But at what cost? A steep one, it seemed. With his communication lines restored, Caesar was now back in touch with his agents, and the news they sent could hardly have been less promising. The Alexandrian escapade had squandered much of the advantage won at Pharsalus. In Italy Antony’s stewardship was provoking widespread resentment; in Asia King Pharnaces, Mithridates’ son, had proved himself a chip off the old block by invading Pontus; in Africa Metellus Scipio and Cato were marshalling a vast new army; in Spain Pompeians were fostering renewed unrest. North, east, south, west – war across the world. There were few places where Caesar was not desperately required. But for two more months he lingered in Egypt. With the Republic fatally riven, and the empire of the Roman people collapsing into anarchy, Caesar, the man whose restless ambition had begun the civil war, lolled by his mistress’s side.

No wonder that Cleopatra’s seductiveness should have struck many Romans as something almost demonic. To tempt a citizen famous for his energies into idleness, to lure him from the path of duty, to keep him from Rome and a destiny that seemed increasingly to have been ordained by the gods – this was a theme worthy of great and terrible poetry. And of obscene chanting too. Caesar’s libido had long been a source of hilarity to his men: ‘Lock up your wives,’ they would sing, ‘our commander is bad news/He may be bald, but he fucks anything that moves.’¹⁶ Other jokes, inevitably, harped on the old gossip about Nicomedes. Even to men who had followed their general through unbelievable hardships, his sexual prowess spelled effeminacy. Great though Caesar had proved himself, steel-hard in body and mind, the moral codes of the Republic were unforgiving. A citizen could never afford to slip. Dirt on a toga would always show.

It was the threat of such ridicule, of course, that helped to keep a Roman a man. Custom, wrote the greatest scholar of Caesar’s day, was ‘a pattern of thought which has evolved to become a regular practice’:* shared and accepted by all the citizens of the Republic, it had provided Rome with the surest foundation of her greatness. How different things were in Alexandria! Raised from scratch on sandbanks, the city lacked deep roots. No wonder, to Roman eyes, that it had such a harlot character. Without custom there could be no shame, and without shame anything became possible. A people whose traditions had withered would become prey to the most repellent and degrading habits. Who better illustrated this than the Ptolemies themselves? No sooner had Cleopatra seen off one sibling than she married another. The spectacle of the heavily pregnant Queen taking as her husband her ten-year-old brother was one to put any of Clodia’s exploits into the shade. Greek Cleopatra may have been, a daughter of the same culture that had provided the bedrock of a Roman’s education, but she was also fabulously, exotically alien. For a man of Caesar’s temperament, with his taste for the taboo, it must have been an enchanting combination.

Yet if Cleopatra provided him with a delicious erotic interlude, an opportunity, for a couple of months, to drop the guard expected of a Roman magistrate, Caesar was never the man to forget his own future, nor that of Rome. Pondering them, he must have been given much food for thought by what he found in Alexandria. Just like its queen, the city was a disorienting blend of the familiar and the weird. With its library and its temples, it was all very Greek – indeed, the capital of the Greek world. Sometimes, however, when the prevailing winds turned and breezes no longer bore a freshness from the sea, sand would gust through Alexandria, carried from the burning desert to the south. The Egyptian hinterland was too vast and too ancient to be entirely ignored. It made of its capital a dreamlike, hybrid place. The spacious streets were decorated not only with the clean-limbed masterpieces of Greek sculptors, but also with statuary looted from the banks of the Nile: sphinxes, gods with animal heads, pharaohs with enigmatic smiles. Just as strikingly – and, to a Roman’s eye, bizarrely – however, there were some quarters of the city in which there were no images of gods to be seen at all. As well as to Greeks and Egyptians, Alexandria was home to a vast number of Jews; more, almost certainly, than Jerusalem itself. They completely dominated one of the city’s five administrative districts, and despite having to rely on a Greek translation of the Torah, they remained in other ways defiantly unassimilated. Jews entering their synagogue, Syrians camped outside beneath a statue of Zeus, all of them in the shadow of a plundered obelisk – this was the look of cosmopolis.

And was it to be Rome’s future too? There were certainly plenty of citizens who feared so. To the Romans, the prospect of being swamped by barbarous cultures had always been a fertile source of paranoia. The ruling classes, in particular, mistrusted foreign influences because they dreaded the enfeebling of the Republic. The world’s mistress, yes, but a world city, no: this, essentially, was the Senate’s manifesto for Rome. So it was that Jews and Babylonian astrologers were endlessly being expelled from the city. So too Egyptian gods. Even in the frantic months before Caesar crossed the Rubicon one of the consuls had found time to pick up an axe and personally start on the demolition of a temple of Isis. But the Jews and astrologers always made their ways back, and the great goddess Isis, divine mother and queen of the heavens, had far too strong a hold upon her worshippers easily to be banished from the city. The consul had been forced to lift the axe against her only because no labourers could be found to do the job. Rome was changing, lapped by tides of immigration, and there was little that the Senate could do to hold them back. New languages, new customs, new religions: these were the fruits of the Republic’s own greatness. Not for nothing did all roads now lead to Rome.

Caesar, who had always been unafraid of the unthinkable, and had anyway long been a virtual stranger to his own city, could see this with a clarity denied to most of his peers. Perhaps he had always seen it. After all, as a boy, Jews had been his neighbours, and he had offered them his family’s protection. Far from alarming him, the presence of immigrants in Rome had served merely to buttress his conceit. Now, as the victor of Pharsalus, he was in a position to patronise entire nations. Throughout the East sculptors were busy chiselling Pompey’s name from inscriptions and replacing it with Caesar’s – the Republic, naturally, being nowhere mentioned. In city after city the descendant of Venus had been hailed as a living god, and in Ephesus as the saviour of mankind, no less. This was heady stuff, even for a man of Caesar’s pitiless intelligence. He did not need to swallow such flattery whole to find it suggestive. Clearly, a role as the saviour of mankind would not easily be accommodated by the constitutional arrangements of the Republic. If Caesar wanted inspiration, then he would have to look elsewhere. No wonder, lingering in Alexandria, that he found Cleopatra so intriguing. Dimly, distortedly, in the figure of the young Egyptian Queen, he surely caught a glimpse of a possible future for himself.

In the late spring of 47 BC the happy couple set out on a cruise down the Nile. To do this was to journey from one world to another. After all, strange as Alexandria struck visiting Romans, it was not altogether alien. Its citizens, like the Romans themselves, were proud of their liberties. Ostensibly, Alexandria was a free city, and the relationship of the monarch to her Greek compatriots was supposed to be that of a first among equals. Civic traditions derived from classical Greece were still cherished, and however hazily they were now understood, Cleopatra could not afford to ignore them altogether. But pass beyond the limits of her capital, glide in her barge past the pyramids or the great pylons of Karnak, and she became something else entirely. The role of pharaoh was one that Cleopatra played with the utmost seriousness. She was the first Greek monarch to speak Egyptian. During the war with her brother she had turned for support not to Alexandria but to her native subjects in the provinces. She was not merely a devotee of the ancient gods, but one of them, divinity made flesh, an incarnation of the queen of the heavens herself.

First citizen of Alexandria and the new Isis: Cleopatra was both. For Caesar, there can have been nothing like taking a goddess to bed to make the scruples of the far-distant Republic appear even more parochial than they had seemed before. It was said that, had his soldiers not started complaining, he would have sailed on with his mistress all the way to Ethiopia. This was scurrilous gossip, but it hinted at a dangerous and plausible truth. Caesar was indeed embarked on a journey into uncharted realms. First, of course, there was a civil war to be won, and it was to achieve this that Caesar, at the end of May, abandoned his Nile cruise and set off with his legions on fresh endeavours and new campaigns. But after victory what then? His time with Cleopatra had given Caesar a good deal to mull over. On the fruits of these reflections much might depend. Not only his own future, perhaps, but that of Rome and the world beyond it too.

Anti Cato

April 46 BC. The sun was setting beyond the walls of Utica. Twenty miles down the shore the ruins of what had once been Carthage were shrouded in the haze of twilight, while off the coast, where ships filled with fugitives dotted the African sea, night had already come. And soon Caesar would be coming too. Despite being vastly outnumbered, he had fought a great battle and been victorious yet again. Metellus Scipio’s army, recruited during the long months of Caesar’s absence in Egypt and Asia, had been routed with terrible slaughter. Africa was in Caesar’s hands. There could be no hope of holding Utica against him. Cato, who was responsible for the city’s defence, knew now for sure that the Republic was doomed.

But even though it was he who had provided the shattered remnants of Scipio’s army with the ships for their escape, he had no intention of joining them. That was hardly Cato’s style. At supper that evening, sitting up, as had been his custom since Pharsalus, he betrayed no sign of alarm. Caesar’s name was not even mentioned. Instead, as the wine flowed, the talk turned to philosophy. The theme of freedom came up, and in particular the claim that only the good can truly be free. One guest, adducing subtle and devious arguments, argued the opposite, but Cato, growing agitated, refused to hear him out. This was the only evidence that he was in any way upset. Having reduced the company to silence, however, he was quick to change the topic. He did not want anyone to guess his feelings – or anticipate his plan.

That night, after retiring to his bedroom and reading for a short while, he stabbed himself. He was still alive when his attendants found him on the floor, but while frantic attempts were made to bandage the wound, Cato pushed away the doctors and tore at his own intestines. He quickly bled to death. When Caesar arrived at Utica he found the whole city in mourning. Bitterly, he addressed the man who had for so long been his nemesis, newly laid, like Pompey, in a grave beside the sea: ‘Just as you envied me the chance of sparing you, Cato, so I envy you this death.’¹⁷ Caesar was hardly the man to appreciate being cheated of a grand gesture. There had been no one more identified with the flinty spirit of Roman liberty than Cato, and to have pardoned him would have been to destroy his infuriating hold on the Republic’s imagination. Instead, thanks to the gory heroism of his death, that hold had now been confirmed. Even as a spectre, Cato remained Caesar’s most obdurate foe.

Blood, honour and liberty: the suicide exemplified all the Romans’ favourite themes. And Caesar, that master of mass manipulation, knew it. Returning to Rome at the end of July 46 BC, he prepared to put his dead enemies where he felt they now belonged – in the shade. Theatrical as Cato’s death had been, Caesar was determined to upstage it. That September, his fellow citizens were invited to share in his victory celebrations. Over the years the Roman people had tended to grow blasé about extravagant spectacle, but the organisation and vision that Caesar brought to his entertainments enabled him to defy the law of diminishing returns. Giraffes and British war chariots, silk canopies and battles on artificial lakes, all were duly gawped at by astonished crowds. Not even Pompey had put on anything to compare; nor had he staged four triumphs in a row as Caesar did now.

Gauls, Egyptians, Asiatics and Africans: these were the foreign foes marched in chains before the cheering crowds. But even though it would clearly have been obscene for Caesar to have celebrated his victory over fellow citizens in such a manner, he could not resist the occasional gloat. Having found the time, between his Egyptian escapade with Cleopatra and his victory in Africa, to thrash King Pharnaces, Caesar had boasted of the speed of his victory in a celebrated phrase: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’¹⁸ Now, written on a billboard and borne in procession through Rome, the same phrase served to cut Pompey down to size too – for it was Pompey who had made such a big deal out of conquering Pharnaces’ father, Mithridates. Yet if the spectre of one rival could be distinguished by knowledgeable citizens trailing Caesar’s chariot in the dust, there was still one shadow who defied the conqueror’s chains. Caesar had defeated Pompey, but he had not beaten Cato – a failure that led him into a rare propaganda gaffe. In his fourth triumph, ostensibly held to celebrate his victory over Africa, Caesar ordered a float illustrating Cato’s suicide to be wheeled through the streets. He justified this by claiming that Cato and all the citizens who had fought with him had been slaves of the Africans, and had perished as collaborators. The watching crowds did not agree. They wept at the sight of the float. Cato still eluded the reach of Caesar’s hatred.

But the Republic itself was now securely in his hands. The Senate, stupefied by the scale of Caesar’s achievements, overawed by the magnitude of his power, had scrabbled to legitimise his victory and somehow reconcile it with the cherished traditions of the past. The strain of this attempt had cost constitutionalists a great deal of pain. Already Caesar had twice accepted the dictatorship: first, in late 49 BC for eleven days when he had presided over his own hurried election to the consulship, and second, in October 48 when he had been appointed to the office for a year. Now, in the spring of 46, he was awarded a dictatorship for the third time – and for the unprecedented span of ten years. Already consul, Caesar was also given the right to nominate all the Republic’s magistrates, and was created – to sardonic amusement – Rome’s ‘Prefect of Morals’. Never before, not even under Sulla, had there been such a concentration of authority in the hands of one man. Yet the example of Sulla did offer at least a glimmer of hope. A decade was a long time to endure a dictatorship, but it was not an eternity. Bitter medicine had proved restorative before. And who, after all, could deny that the Republic was very sick indeed?

There was even a measure of sympathy for the man burdened with its cure. ‘We are his slaves,’ wrote Cicero, ‘but he is the slave of the times.’¹⁹ No one could really know what Caesar’s plans for the Republic might be, because no one could know how the Republic was to be healed of the wounds of civil war. Yet the vague hope persisted, even among his enemies, that if anyone could find a way out of the crisis, then Caesar was the man. His qualities of brilliance and clemency were clearly incomparable. Nor was there anyone credible left to oppose him: Pompey, Domitius and Cato, all were dead. So too now was Scipio, caught in a storm and lost off the African coast. True, Pompey’s two sons, Gnaeus and Sextus, were still at large, but they were young and had vicious reputations. In the winter of 46 BC, when they succeeded in raising a dangerous rebellion in Spain, and Caesar hurriedly left Rome to confront it, even former partisans of Pompey wished their old enemy well. Typical was Cassius Longinus, the officer who had performed so creditably at Carrhae, and who had gone on to become Pompey’s most brilliant naval commander, before being pardoned by Caesar after Pharsalus. ‘I’d much rather have our old, merciful master’, he confessed to Cicero, as the two men discussed the news of Caesar’s progress in Spain, ‘than have to take our chance with a new and bloodthirsty one.’²⁰

Even so, there was a bitterness to Cassius’ tone. A master remained a master, no matter how gracious. Most citizens, glad to be alive after the years of civil war, were too exhausted to care. But among Caesar’s peers, jealousy and impotence festered, as did humiliation. Better to die than live a slave: this was the lesson that a Roman drew in with his breath. One could submit to the dictator, and be grateful to him, even admire him – but one could never repress the resulting sense of shame. ‘To the free men who accepted Caesar’s perks, his very power to dole them out was an affront.’²¹ And all the more so, of course, because of the memory of what had happened at Utica.

Cato’s ghost still haunted the conscience of Rome. Those of his former comrades who had submitted to Caesar and been rewarded for it could not help but see in his death a personal reproach. None more so than Brutus, Cato’s nephew, who had initially condemned his uncle’s suicide on philosophical grounds, but began to find himself ever more unsettled by the example it had set. Earnest and high minded as he was, Brutus had no wish to be regarded as a collaborator. Still confident that Caesar was, at heart, a constitutionalist, he saw no contradiction between supporting the dictator and remaining loyal to the memory of his uncle. In the cause of making this as clear as he could, Brutus decided that his wife would have to go, and Porcia, Cato’s daughter, take her place. Since Porcia’s previous husband had been Marcus Bibulus, a bride less popular with Caesar would have been hard to imagine. Brutus had made his point.

But he was not done yet. Wishing his uncle’s memory to be immortalised, Brutus turned his hand to an obituary. He also asked Cicero, as Rome’s greatest writer, to do the same. The commission was flattering, but Cicero, accepting it after due hesitation, was prompted as much by shame as by vanity. As he was all too painfully aware, he had not had a good war, and his acceptance of a pardon from Caesar had only confirmed his reputation as a trimmer. In the face of widespread contempt Cicero still clung to his self-image as a fearless spokesman for republican virtue, but the reality was that, since making his peace with Caesar, the height of his bravery had been the cracking of an occasional poisonous joke. Now, by lauding the martyr of Utica publicly, he dared to stick his neck out a little further. Cato, Cicero wrote, was one of the few men who had been greater than his reputation. It was a pointed judgement, targeted not only at the dictator, but, by implication, at all those who had bowed to his supremacy – including, not least of course, the author himself.

Far away in Spain, surrounded by dust and blood-fattened flies, Caesar was still keeping abreast of Rome’s literary scene. When he read what Cicero and Brutus had written, he was toweringly unamused. No sooner had the decisive engagement of the campaign been fought and won than he was writing a vituperative riposte. Cato, he argued, far from being a hero, had been a contemptible drunk, obstructive and mad, thoroughly without worth. This composition, the Anti Cato, was then dispatched to Rome, where it was greeted with widespread hilarity, so unrecognisable was the caricature of its subject that it gave. Cato’s reputation, far from being diminished by Caesar’s attack, was raised to new heights.

Caesar himself was left embittered and frustrated. Already, during the Spanish campaign, there had been signs that his considerable reserves of patience were nearing exhaustion. The war had been peculiarly brutal. Far from treating the rebels with his customary clemency, Caesar had refused to recognise them as citizens at all. Their corpses had been used as building material, and their heads stuck on poles. Even though Sextus, Pompey’s younger son, had managed to escape Caesar’s vengeance, Gnaeus, the elder, had been captured, executed and his head paraded as a trophy of war. These were scenes worthy of Gauls. Yet even though it was Caesar who had turned head-hunter, he accepted no responsibility for the descent of his army into barbarism. Instead, the true fault lay with the treachery and folly of his opponents. It was Fate that had delivered the fortunes of the Roman people into his hands. If they now refused to support him in his efforts to bind their wounds, then not even the blood already spilled would serve to appease the angry gods. Rome, and the world with her, would be lost to a tide of darkness, and the barbarism would prove universal.

Faced with the need to stave off such an apocalypse, what were the sensibilities of a Cicero or a Brutus? What, indeed, was the Republic? Caesar’s impatience with traditions still regarded as sacrosanct by his fellow citizens was growing more palpable by the day. Far from hurrying back to the capital to consult the Senate or put his measures to the people, he lingered in the provinces, planting colonies of veterans, extending the franchise to privileged natives. Back in Rome the aristocracy shuddered at the news. Jokes were told of Gauls peeling off their stinking trousers, draping themselves in togas, and asking the way to the Senate House. Such xenophobia, of course, had always been a Roman’s right and privilege. Almost by definition, it was those most proud of the liberties of the Republic who proved the worst snobs. But Caesar scorned them. He could no longer be bothered to care what traditionalists thought.

Nor, indeed, was he much interested in the traditions themselves. This was just as well, for his policies raised awkward questions about the future functioning of the Republic. If it had been impractical enough for citizens in Italy to come to Rome to cast their votes, then for those in distant provinces, far away across the sea, it would be impossible. The problem was brushed aside. Caesar was not to be diverted by such quibbles. He had the foundations of a truly universal empire to lay – and with it, not coincidentally, a global supremacy for himself. Every native enfranchised, and every colonist settled, was a brick in his new order. Roman aristocrats had always commanded clients, but Caesar’s patronage would extend to the very limits of sand and ice. Syrians and Spaniards, Africans and Gauls, the far-flung peoples of a shrinking world would henceforward owe their allegiance not to the lethal amateurism of the Republic but to a single man. As a symbol of this future, nothing was more potent than Caesar’s plan for Carthage and Corinth. Flattened by the vengeful legions, these two cities were now to be rebuilt, monuments to a new age of universal peace and to the glory of their patron. Utica, down the coast from the new colony of Carthage, would be put forever in the shade. The future would be raised upon the rubble of the past. For the first time citizens living in Rome would be made to feel that they were parts, as well as the masters, of one world.

Which is not to say that Caesar meant to neglect his own city. He had big plans for Rome: a library was to be founded; a new theatre to rival Pompey’s cut out from the rock of the Capitol; the largest temple in the world built on the Campus. Even the Tiber, Caesar had decided, would have to be diverted, because its course obstructed his building plans. Nothing could better have illustrated the startling nature of his supremacy than this: that he could not only build where and what he wanted, but also, as though he were a god drawing on the landscape with his fingertip, order the city’s topography changed. Clearly, the ten years of Caesar’s dictatorship were going to alter the appearance of Rome for ever. A city that had always expressed through its ramshackle appearance its ancient liberties would soon look radically different – would soon look almost Greek.

And specifically, like Alexandria. There had been an early hint that this might be so in Caesar’s choice of house guests. In September 46 BC, just in time to watch her lover’s triumphs, Cleopatra had swept into town. Ensconcing herself in Caesar’s mansion on the far side of the Tiber, she had refused to make any allowances for republican sensibilities, instead playing up the role of an Egyptian queen to the full. She not only brought her husband–brother and an entourage of eunuchs with her, but also had an heir to parade, a one-year-old prince. Caesar, already married, had refused to acknowledge his bastard son, but Cleopatra, nothing daunted, had flaunted the obvious by naming the boy Caesarion. Naturally, Rome was scandalised. Equally naturally, everyone who was anyone flocked across the Tiber to gawp. The manner in which Cleopatra greeted visitors reflected her estimation of whether they mattered: Cicero, for instance, who found her hateful, she roundly snubbed. Effectively, of course, the Queen had eyes for only one man. In August 45, when Caesar finally returned to Italy, she hurried off to meet him.* The two of them luxuriated together on holiday in the countryside. Only in October did Caesar finally return to Rome.

He found a city convulsed by wild gossip. It was said – and believed – that he planned to move the seat of empire to Alexandria. Less ludicrously, it was also claimed that he wished to marry Cleopatra, despite the fact that he already had a wife. Caesar himself did nothing to discountenance these rumours by setting up a golden statue of his mistress in the temple of Venus – an unprecedented and shocking honour. And since Venus was the goddess most closely identified with Isis, there was a hint here of an even greater and more ominous scandal. If Cleopatra were to be represented in the heart of the Republic as a goddess, then what plans did her lover have for himself? And exactly why were workmen adding a pediment to his mansion, as though it were a temple? And what was the truth of the rumour that Antony had been appointed his high priest? Caesar was hardly being reticent in scattering out the clues.

Goddess brides and self-deification: he knew that his fellow citizens were bound to be appalled. But there were others, particularly in the East, who would not be. Rome might have bowed to Caesar, but there were still parts of the globe that had not yet bowed to Rome. Most obdurate of these was Parthia, whose horsemen, taking advantage of the Republic’s civil war, had dared to cross the frontier into Syria. There was also Carrhae to avenge, of course, and the lost eagles to regain, responsibilities certainly worthy of the dictator’s attention. Yet, coming so soon after his return to Rome, Caesar’s plan to set off to war again could not help but leave the city feeling diminished, almost spurned. It was as though the problems of the Republic bored the man appointed to solve them, as though Rome herself were now too small a stage for his ambitions. In the East they would appreciate this. In the East they already worshipped Caesar as a god. In the East there were traditions older by far than the Republic, of the flesh becoming divine, and of the rule of a king of kings.

And there, for anxious Romans, lay the rub. Late in 45 BC the Senate announced that Caesar was henceforward to be honoured as divus Iulius: Julius the God. Who now could doubt that he was preparing to break the ultimate taboo and set a crown upon his head? There were certainly grounds for such a horrific suspicion. Early in 44 Caesar began appearing in the high red boots once worn by kings in Italy’s legendary past; around the same time he reacted with fury when a diadem that had mysteriously appeared on one of his statues was removed. Public alarm grew. Caesar appears to have realised that he had gone too far. On 15 February, dressed in a purple toga, sporting a golden wreath, he ostentatiously refused Antony’s offer of a crown. The occasion was a festival, and Rome was heaving with holiday crowds. As Antony repeated the offer ‘a groan echoed all the way round the Forum’.²² Again Caesar refused the crown, this time with a firmness that brooked no future contradiction. Perhaps, had the crowds cheered, he might have accepted Antony’s offer, but it seems unlikely. Caesar knew that the Romans would never tolerate a King Julius. Nor, surely, in the final analysis, did he care. The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation. This was the lesson that his stay in Alexandria had taught him. Just as Cleopatra was both a pharaoh to the Egyptians and a Macedonian queen among the Greeks, so Caesar could be at once a living god in Asia and a dictator to the Romans. Why offend the sensibilities of his fellow citizens by abolishing the Republic when – as Caesar himself was said to have pointed out – the Republic had been reduced to ‘nothingness, a name only, without body or substance’?²³What mattered was not the form but the reality of power. And Caesar, unlike Sulla, had no intention of relinquishing it.

A few days before Antony offered him the crown the Senate had officially appointed him dictator for life.* With this fateful measure the last feeble hope that Caesar might one day return the Republic to its citizens had been snuffed out. But would the Romans care? Caesar’s calculation was that they would not. The people he had lulled with games, and welfare, and peace. The Senate he had numbed into quietude, not with open menaces but by the threat of what might result from his removal: ‘Better an illegal tyrant than a civil war.’²⁴ This was the opinion of Favonius, Cato’s most loyal admirer. It was a judgement widely shared. Caesar, knowing this, scorned the hatred of his peers. He dismissed his guard of two thousand men. He walked openly in the Forum, attended only by the lictors due to his office. And when informers brought him news of a rumoured assassination plot, and urged him to hunt down the conspirators, he dismissed their anxieties out of hand. ‘He would rather die, he said, than be feared.’²⁵

Nor was it as though he would be in Rome for much longer. He was due to leave for Parthia on 18 March. True, a soothsayer had advised him to beware the Ides, which fell that month on the fifteenth, but Caesar had never shown much regard for superstitions. Only in his private conversation did he betray any intimations of mortality. On the evening of the fourteenth, one month after being appointed dictator for life, Caesar dined with Lepidus, the patrician who had joined his cause in 49 BC and was now his deputy in the dictatorship, a position officially entitled the ‘Master of Horse’. Confident that he was among friends, Caesar dropped his guard. ‘What is the sweetest kind of death?’ he was asked. Back shot Caesar’s response: ‘The kind that comes without warning.’²⁶ To be warned was to be fearful; to be fearful was to be emasculated. That night, when Caesar’s wife suffered nightmares and begged him not to attend the Senate the next day, he laughed. In the morning, borne in his litter, he caught sight of the soothsayer who had told him to beware of the Ides of March. ‘The day which you warned me against is here,’ Caesar said, smiling, ‘and I am still alive.’ ‘Yes,’ came the answer, swift and inevitable. ‘It is here – but it is not yet past.’²⁷

The Senate that morning had arranged to meet in Pompey’s great assembly hall. Games were being held in the adjacent theatre, and as Caesar descended from his litter he would have heard the roars of the Roman people thrilling to spectacles of blood. But the noise would soon have been dimmed by the cool marble of the portico, and even more by that of the assembly hall that waited beyond. Pompey’s statue still dominated the Senate’s meeting-space. After Pharsalus it had been hurriedly pulled down, but Caesar, with typical generosity, had ordered it restored, along with all of Pompey’s other statues. An investment policy, Cicero had sneered, against his own being removed – but that was malicious and unfair. Caesar had no reason to fear for the future of his statues. Nor, walking into the assembly hall that morning and seeing the senators rise to greet him, for himself. Not even when a crowd of them approached him with a petition, mobbing him as he sat down in his gilded chair, pressing him down with their kisses. Then suddenly he felt his toga being pulled down from his shoulders. ‘Why,’ he cried out, startled, ‘this is violence!’²⁸ At the same moment he felt a slashing pain across his throat. Twisting around he saw a dagger, red with his own blood.

Some sixty men stood in a press around him. All of them had drawn daggers from under their togas. All of them were well known to Caesar. Many were former enemies who had accepted his pardon – but even more were friends.²⁹ Some were officers who had served with him in Gaul, among them Decimus Brutus, commander of the war fleet that had wiped out the Venetians. The most grievous betrayal, however, the one that finally numbed Caesar and stopped him in his desperate efforts to fight back, came from someone closer still. Caesar glimpsed, flashing through the mêlée, a knife aimed at his groin, held by another Brutus, Marcus, his reputed son. ‘You too, my boy?’³⁰ he whispered, then fell to the ground. Not wishing to be witnessed in his death-agony, he covered his head with the ribbons of his toga. The pool of his blood stained the base of Pompey’s statue. Dead, he lay in his great rival’s shadow.

But if there appeared to be symbolism in this, then it was illusory. Caesar had not been sacrificed to the cause of any faction. True, one of the two ring-leaders of the conspiracy had been Cassius Longinus, one of Pompey’s former officers. But when Cassius had argued for the assassination not only of Caesar but also of Antony and Lepidus, and a wholesale destruction of the dictator’s regime, his case had been overruled. Brutus, the other leader, and the conscience of the conspiracy, had refused to hear of it. They were conducting an execution, he had argued, not a squalid manoeuvre in a political fight. And Brutus had prevailed. For Brutus was known to be an honourable man, and worthy to serve as the spokesman and avenger of the Republic.

In the beginning there had been kings, and the last king had been a tyrant. And a man named Brutus had expelled him from the city and set up the consulship, and all the institutions of a free Republic. And now, 465 years later, Brutus, his descendant, had struck down a second tyrant. Leading his fellow conspirators out of Pompey’s great complex, he stumbled and ran in his excitement across the Campus. Holding his bloodstained dagger proudly aloft, he headed for the Forum. There, in the people’s meeting-place, he proclaimed the glad news: Caesar was dead; liberty was restored; the Republic was saved.

As though in derisory answer, from across the Campus came the sound of screams. The spectators at Pompey’s theatre were rioting, crushing one another in their panic. Wisps of smoke were already rising into the sky; shops were being smashed as looters set to work. More distantly, the first wails of grief could be heard as Rome’s Jews began the mourning for the man who had always served as their patron. Elsewhere, however, as news of what had happened spread across the city, there was only silence. Far from rushing to the Forum to acclaim the liberators, citizens were rushing to their homes and barring their doors.

The Republic was saved. But what was the Republic now? Stillness hung over the city and no answer could be discerned.

THE DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC

The Last Stand

Crisis or no crisis, the Season remained inviolable. Spring, flower-bright and crystalline, was when fashionable society decamped out of town. April 44 BC was no different. In the weeks following Caesar’s murder Rome began to empty. Many of those shuttering up their mansions must have felt relieved to be leaving the febrile, panic-racked city behind. Not that the country was without its own headaches. Cicero, for instance, arriving at his favourite villa just south of Rome, found it full of builders. He decided to continue on his way and headed south for the Bay of Naples – where he was promptly ambushed by surveyors. It appeared that a retail complex he had inherited in Puteoli was showing cracks. Two shops had actually collapsed. ‘Even the mice have moved out,’ Cicero sighed, ‘to say nothing of the tenants.’ Drawing inspiration from the example of Socrates, however, the landlord professed to be sublimely indifferent to his real-estate problems: ‘Immortal gods, what do such trivialities matter to me?’¹

Yet the consolations of philosophy had their limits. At other times Cicero would confess to being in a permanent mood of irritation. ‘Old age’, he complained, ‘makes me ever more dyspeptic.’² Now in his sixties, he felt himself a failure. It was not only his political career that had imploded. So too, over the previous few years, had his family life. First, amid much bitterness and mutual recrimination, he divorced his wife of more than thirty years and hitched himself to one of his wealthy, teenage wards. Twitted for marrying a virgin at his age, Cicero goatishly retorted that she would not be staying a virgin for long – but nor did she stay a bride. Only weeks after the wedding Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, died of complications following childbirth. Cicero was devastated. His new wife, transformed from trophy to unwanted distraction, was sent packing back to her mother, while Cicero, obsessively, tended the flame of his grief. Tullia, affectionate and intelligent, had been her father’s dearest companion. Now, with her gone, Cicero was desolate. His friends, perturbed by what they saw as unmanly emotionalism, sought to remind him of his duties as a citizen, but the old catchwords, once such an inspiration, served only to deepen his sense of despair. Painfully, to a well-wisher, he sought to explain: ‘There was a time when I could find in my home a refuge from the miseries of public life. But now, oppressed by domestic unhappiness as I am, there is no doing the opposite – no taking refuge in the affairs of state, and the comforts they once offered. And so I stay clear of both the Forum and of home.’³ Glimpsed in the mirror of Cicero’s grief, the Republic appeared to have taken on his daughter’s semblance: that of a young woman, goddess-like, beloved … and dead.

Then the Ides of March. Brutus, raising his dagger wet with Caesar’s blood, had called out Cicero’s name and congratulated him on the recovery of liberty. Cicero himself, startled and delighted, had reciprocated by hailing the conspirators as heroes, and Caesar’s murder as a glorious event. But it was only a start – and maybe, Cicero was soon fretting, not even that. Brutus and Cassius might have succeeded in striking down Caesar, but they had made no attempt to destroy his regime. Instead an awkward truce had been patched up between the dictator’s assassins and his henchmen, and as a result the advantage was daily slipping through the conspirators’ grasp. Already Brutus and Cassius had been forced by the menaces of pro-Caesarian demagogues to flee Rome. Cicero, who had been urging more ruthlessness and resolution on them, lambasted their strategy as ‘absurd’. It was said that the conspirators had decided to exclude him from their plans because they feared that he had grown timid with age. Now the old man paid them back in fitting coin. To the sacred task of redeeming the Republic from tyranny, he complained, the conspirators had brought ‘the spirits of men, but the foresight of children’.⁴

Naturally, even in the depths of his despond, the role of knowing elder statesman was one that Cicero could not help but relish. Few would have denied his right to it. The parvenu from Arpinum had become, to younger generations, an almost iconic figure, the very embodiment of tradition, a living relic of a vanished age of giants. Despite his gloating over the murder of their leader, he remained an object of curiosity even to Caesarians. One of these, a particularly startling visitor, was a fair-haired, bright-eyed young man, no more than eighteen, who dropped by to pay his respects while Cicero was still holidaying outside Puteoli. Only a month previously Gaius Octavius, the dictator’s great-nephew, had been in the Balkans, stationed with the expeditionary force for Parthia. When the news of Caesar’s murder had reached him he had sailed at once for Brundisium. There he had learned of his formal adoption in Caesar’s will, becoming, by its terms, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and being mobbed by crowds of his adoptive father’s veterans. With their cheers still ringing in his ears, he had set off for Rome, but, rather than rushing headlong to the capital, had first turned aside to pay a visit to the Bay of Naples. Touring the holiday villas, he had consulted with assorted Caesarian heavyweights and made his pilgrimage to Cicero. The venerable republican, for once proving impervious to flattery, had refused to be charmed. After all, it was Octavian’s sacred duty, as Caesar’s heir, to hunt down the murderers of his adoptive father. How was such an avenger ever to become a good citizen? ‘Impossible,’ Cicero sniffed.⁵ Pointedly, he referred to the young man by his original name, Octavius, and not – as Octavian himself now preferred to be called – Julius Caesar alone.* For Cicero, one Julius Caesar had been more than enough.

Even so, he can hardly have been seriously alarmed by Octavian’s prospects. The young man was heading on from Puteoli armed with little more than the magic of his name and a determination to claim his inheritance in full. In the snake-pit of Rome these were not decisive qualifications. Indeed, for established Caesarians, let alone Caesar’s enemies, they verged on the provocative. The dictator might have named Octavian as his legal heir, but there were others, trusted lieutenants in positions of great power, who also had their eyes fixed on their dead master’s legacy. Now that Caesar was gone, the ambitions of Rome’s leading men once again had free play, but hardly in the manner that Brutus and Cassius had anticipated. ‘Freedom has been restored,’ Cicero noted in perplexity, ‘and yet the Republic has not.’⁶

Which was, as he further noted, ‘unprecedented’ – and raised a terrifying prospect. Was it possible that the old rules, the old traditions, poisoned by civil war, had been placed forever beyond recovery? If so, then a disorienting and blood-sodden new order threatened, one in which a magistracy would always prove to be of less moment than an army, and legitimacy less than the threat of naked violence. Already, by the summer of 44 BC, the outlines of such a future could be glimpsed. Would-be warlords toured the colonies where Caesar had settled his veterans, currying favour, offering bribes. Even Brutus and Cassius tried to get in on the act. The welcome they received from Caesar’s veterans was, unsurprisingly, chilly. By late summer they had come to the reluctant conclusion that Italy was no longer safe for them. Quietly, they slipped away – for the East, it was said, although no one could be sure. For men who had claimed to be liberators, exile anywhere was a bitter defeat.

And for those who had looked to them for leadership it was a disaster. Now, with Brutus and Cassius gone, it would take even more courage to stay behind, to defend the Republic where it still mattered most: in the city that had given birth to its freedoms, before the Senate and the people of Rome. Who was left to make such a stand? Eyes turned to Cicero – but, panicky and a born civilian, he had also vanished from Rome. His intention, painfully arrived at after much vacillation, had been to sail to Athens, where his son, who was supposed to be studying, was instead making a name for himself as the university’s foremost drunk. But the anxious father, eager to set his heir back on the straight and narrow, had no sooner set sail than he was swept by bad weather back into port, and it was there, while waiting for the storms to subside, that he learned how his journey was being represented back in Rome. ‘Fine! Abandon your country!’⁷ even the imperturbable Atticus had written to him. Cicero was mortified. Both shame and vanity served to steel his fluttering nerves. But so too did the knowledge that it was his duty to stand his ground, to beard the warlords in their den. Out came his luggage from the cargo hold. Bracing himself for the fray, Cicero set off back to Rome.

It was the most courageous decision of his life. But it was not entirely reckless. True, Cicero brought no legions to the armed and carnivorous death-struggle – but he did bring his unsurpassed powers of oratory, his well-honed skills in political dog-fighting and his prestige. The news of his arrival in Rome brought out cheering crowds to welcome him, and even among the highest echelons of the Caesarian grandees he did not lack for contacts. If he could only attach some of these to the cause of the constitution, Cicero hoped, then all might yet be well. He had two particular targets: Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa. Both were prominent Caesarian officers, and had been appointed by the dictator as consuls-designate for the succeeding year, 43 BC. Of course, to Cicero, the fact that magistracies had been allocated in advance, without any reference to the electorate, was an outrage, but one which, for the moment, he was prepared to swallow. Hirtius and Pansa were both, by the standards of the troubled times, moderates, even to the extent of having asked Cicero himself for lessons in public speaking. Certainly, there were other Caesarians whom Cicero would far rather have seen excluded from the consulship. And of them all, in his opinion, the most dangerous was Mark Antony, who already held the office, not to mention an army and Caesar’s treasure to boot.

As far as Cicero was concerned, even the most attractive aspects of Antony’s character – his boldness, charm and generosity – served only to brand the consul all the more a menace. As did his taste in women: after years of pursuing Fulvia, Antony had finally succeeded in hitching himself to Clodius’ domineering widow. Pleasure-loving and exhibitionist as he was, Antony appeared to Cicero a worthy heir of Clodius’ bed, and as such a self-evident public danger. But there was another spectre, even grimmer, standing at Antony’s shoulder. ‘Why should it have been my fate’, Cicero pondered, ‘that for the past two decades the Republic has never had an enemy who did not turn out to be my enemy as well?’⁸ No doubt Catiline’s spectre would have laughed hollowly at that question. Indeed, Cicero’s conceit in 44 BC was, if anything, even greater than it had been during the year of his consulship. By denouncing Antony, he was effectively declaring war not on an open rebel, as Catiline had been, but on a man who was himself the head of state. But Cicero was unabashed. As with Catiline, so now with Antony, he believed himself confronted by a monster. Only by cutting off its head, he trusted, would the Republic be restored at least half-way to health. So it was that Cicero, the spokesman of legitimacy, prepared to work for the destruction of a consul.

As so many of his campaigns had done, the great orator’s assault on Antony was to prove inspirational and specious in equal measure. With a series of electrifying speeches to the Senate, Cicero sought to rouse his fellow citizens from the torpor of despair, to school them in their deepest ideals, to remind them of what they had been and might be still. ‘Life is not merely a matter of breathing. The slave has no true life. All other nations are capable of enduring servitude – but our city is not.’ Here, in Cicero’s oratory, was a worthy threnody for Roman freedom: both a soaring assertion of the Republic’s heroic past and a rage against the dying of the light. ‘So glorious is it to recover liberty, that it is better to die than shrink from regaining it.’⁹

To this claim, ancient generations had borne witness, and Cicero, by staking his life, was at last proving himself worthy of the ideals he had for so long aimed to defend. But there were other traditions, just as ancient, to which his speeches were also bearing witness. In the public life of the Republic, partisanship had always been savage, and the tricks of political rhetoric unforgiving. Now, in Cicero’s mauling of Antony, these same tricks received their apotheosis. Elevated calls to arms alternated with the crudest abuse, as, throughout Cicero’s speeches caricatures of a drunken Antony – vomiting up gobbets of meat, chasing after boys, pawing at actresses – were conjured. Malicious, rancorous, unfair – but it was the mark of a free Republic that its citizens’ speech be free too. For too long Cicero had felt himself gagged. Now, for his swansong, he spoke without inhibition. As only he could, he touched the heights and in his next breath plumbed the depths.

Yet his words, like sparks borne on a gale, needed kindling – and this Cicero could only hope to procure by the dark and time-hallowed arts of political fixing. The Caesarian warlords had to be turned against each other and poisoned against Antony, just as rival noblemen had been persuaded to turn against the over-mighty throughout the Republic’s history. Hirtius and Pansa, already suspicious of Antony, needed little encouragement, but Cicero, not content with wooing the consuls-designate, was also luring a far more dramatic recruit to the cause. Only a few months previously he had cold-shouldered Octavian; now, in the dying days of 44 BC, there were few – and certainly not Cicero – who would presume to do that.

Even the gods had blessed the young Caesar with formidable proof of their favour. As Octavian, beneath a cloudless sky, had entered Rome for the first time, a halo in the form of a rainbow had appeared around the sun. Then, three months later, an even more spectacular phenomenon occurred. While Octavian was staging games in honour of his murdered father, a comet had blazed over Rome. It was hailed by the excited spectators as the soul of Caesar ascending to the heavens. Octavian, who privately regarded the comet as a portent of his own greatness, had publicly agreed – as well he might have done, for to become the son of a god was no small promotion, even for Caesar’s heir. ‘You, boy, owe everything to your name,’¹⁰ Antony had sneered. But if Octavian’s good fortune had been prodigious, then so too was the skill that he had brought to exploiting his inheritance. Already, even Antony, the seasoned populist, was finding himself outplayed. Requested to hand over Caesar’s treasure so that certain legacies promised to the people could be paid, he had proved obstructive; meanwhile, Octavian, speculating to accumulate, had coolly auctioned off some of his own estates and paid for the legacies out of the proceeds.

His reward was spectacular popularity – not only with the urban mob, but with Caesar’s veterans too. Recruiting head to head with Antony, Octavian soon had a private – and wholly illegal – bodyguard of three thousand men. With this, he briefly occupied the Forum, and although he was soon forced to retreat in the face of Antony’s much larger army, he remained a palpable threat to his rival’s ambitions.

By now it was late in the year, and Antony’s term of office was drawing to its close. Desperate to secure a continued power base, the consul marched north, crossed the Rubicon into Gaul, and proclaimed himself the governor of the province. Blocking his path was Decimus Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, who also claimed the post. Rather than surrender his province to Antony, Decimus chose instead to barricade himself in Modena and sit out the winter. Antony, advancing, settled down to starve him out. The new civil war, long threatening, had finally begun. And all the while, as Caesar’s two former lieutenants locked horns, Caesar’s heir lurked in their rear, a menacing but imponderable factor, his loyalties uncertain, his ambitions even more so.

Only to Cicero had he claimed to open his soul. Octavian had not ceased to woo the old statesman since their first meeting. Cicero, still suspicious of such flattering attentions, had wrestled painfully with the temptation that Octavian represented to him. On the one hand, as he had wailed plaintively to Atticus, ‘Only look at his name, his age!’¹¹ How could Cicero possibly take Caesar’s heir at face value when the young adventurer, sending endless requests for advice, addressed him as ‘Father’ and insisted that he and his followers were at the service of the Republic? But, on the other hand, bearing in mind the desperate nature of the crisis, what was there to lose? By December, with reports of war arriving from the north, Cicero had finally made up his mind. On the twentieth he addressed a packed Senate House. Even as he continued to press for the destruction of Antony, the legitimate consul, he demanded that Octavian – ‘yes, a young man still, almost a boy’¹² – be rewarded for his recruitment of a private army with fulsome public honours. To waverers, who were understandably startled by this proposition, Cicero protested that Octavian was already a glittering credit to the Republic. ‘I guarantee it, Fathers of the Senate, I promise it and solemnly swear it!’ Of course, as Cicero himself knew full well, he was protesting too much. All the same, even in private, he was not entirely cynical about Octavian’s prospects. Who was to say how the young man sitting at his knee, absorbing his wisdom and the ancient ideals of the Republic, might prosper? And should Octavian, despite Cicero’s tutorship, prove an unworthy pupil, then there would be ways to deal with him, when the occasion and opportunity arrived. ‘The young man should be lauded, glorified – then raised to the skies.’¹³ Just as Caesar had been, in other words.

This, of course, was precisely the kind of indiscreet witticism that had landed Cicero in hot water in the past. The joke spread like wildfire, and, inevitably, Octavian got to hear of it too. Cicero, however, could afford to shrug off the embarrassment. After all, Octavian was only one part of the coalition that he had patched together, nor even the most significant part of it. In April 43 BC the two consuls of the Roman people, Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa, finally advanced against Antony. Octavian, with two legions, marched as their lieutenant. In two successive battles Antony was defeated and forced to withdraw across the Alps. News of the double victory, when it was brought to a waiting Rome, appeared the ultimate vindication of Cicero’s high-risk, high-stakes policy. Cicero himself, as he had been in the year of his consulship, was hailed as the saviour of his country. Antony was officially pronounced a public enemy. The Republic appeared to have been saved.

Then fresh messengers arrived in Rome bringing cruel and bitter news. The two consuls were both dead, one in battle, the other of wounds. Octavian, unsurprisingly, was refusing any form of rapprochement with Decimus Brutus. Antony, in the confusion, had got clean away. He was now marching along the coast beyond the Alps, into the province of another of Caesar’s lieutenants, Marcus Lepidus. The army of the ‘Master of Horse’, seven legions strong, was formidable, and its loyalties, as Antony drew ever nearer to it, had suddenly become an issue of desperate, even decisive, concern. In letters to the Senate, Lepidus reassured its leaders of his continued allegiance – but his men, seasoned Caesarians all, were already making up his mind for him the other way. On 30 May, days of fraternisation between the armies of Antony and Lepidus climaxed in a formal compact between their two generals and the union of their forces. Decimus Brutus, hopelessly outnumbered, attempted to flee but was betrayed by a Gallic chieftain and killed. The armies of the Senate, with baffling speed, had melted away utterly. Antony, on the run only a few weeks previously, had emerged stronger than ever. Now, it was only the young Caesar who stood between him and a march on Rome.

Which way would Octavian turn? The capital swarmed with rumours, and sweated on the answer. It would not be long in coming. In late July a centurion from Octavian’s army suddenly appeared in the Senate House. From the assembled gathering he demanded the consulship, still vacant, for his general. The Senate refused. The centurion brushed back his cloak and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘If you do not make him consul,’ he warned, ‘then this will.’¹⁴ And so it happened. Once again a Caesar crossed the Rubicon. By now Octavian’s army numbered eight legions, and there was no one to oppose him. Cicero, sick at the ruinous end of all his hopes, trudged out with the rest of the Senate to welcome the conqueror. Desperately, he spun new proposals to Octavian, new plans. ‘Octavian, however, made no answer, save for the mocking reply that Cicero had been the last of his friends to come and greet him.’¹⁵

Permitted – or ordered – to leave Rome, the orator retreated to his favourite country villa. The building work on it had been completed, but there could be no more repairs to its owner’s ruined career. It was over – and with it, much else besides. Cicero followed his protégé’s progress with mute despair. On 19 August Octavian, still not yet twenty, was formally elected consul. Then, having secured the condemnation of Caesar’s assassins as traitors, he left Rome and marched northwards, straight towards the advancing army of Antony and Lepidus. Between the rival Caesarian leaders, unchallenged masters now of the entire Western empire, there was to be no war. Instead, on an island in a river near Medina, with their armies lined up on either bank, Antony and Octavian met, embraced and kissed each other’s cheek. Then, along with Lepidus, they settled down to carve up the world and pronounce the Republic dead.

Naturally, they disguised their purpose with specious and familiar words. They claimed not to be pronouncing the obituary of the Republic but setting it back in order. In truth, they were executing it. As a result of the island conference it was agreed that a triumvirate should be established, but not a loose and shifting alliance as had been established between Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. This time it would be formally constituted and endowed with ferocious powers. For five years the triumvirs were to exercise proconsular authority over the entire empire. They were to have the right to pass or annul laws as they pleased, without reference to the Senate or the Roman people. Martial law was extended into the sacred space of Rome herself. This, after more than four hundred years of Roman freedom, was effectively the end.

And the Republic’s quietus, fittingly, was sealed and signed with blood. The triumvirs, pronouncing their dead leader’s policy of clemency a failure, looked back instead to an earlier dictator for inspiration. The return of proscription lists was foreshadowed in Rome by grim and unmistakable portents: dogs howled like wolves, and wolves were seen running through the Forum; in the sky loud shouts were heard, along with the clash of weapons and the pounding of unseen hooves. The lists went up within days of the triumvirs’ entry into the city. Ruthless bargaining among the three men had determined whose names would appear on them. One factor more than any other had influenced their decisions: with more than sixty legions needing to be paid, the triumvirate was in desperate need of funds. As a result, the fruit of riches, as it had been under Sulla, became death. Even an exile such as Verres, enjoying his ill-gotten gains in sun-soaked exile, was proscribed – killed, it was said, for his ‘Corinthian bronzes’.¹⁶ Some were murdered for factional reasons – to remove potential adversaries of the new regime – and others were victims of personal enmities and feuds. Most chillingly of all, as proof of their commitment to the triumvirate, Antony, Lepidus and Octavian had each sacrificed a man they might otherwise have felt obliged to save. So it was that Antony had agreed to the proscription of his uncle and Lepidus his brother. Octavian, meanwhile, had put down the name of the man he had once called ‘Father’.

Even so, Cicero could have escaped. News of his proscription reached him well in advance of the bounty-hunters. Typically, however, he panicked and vacillated over what to do. Rather than setting sail to join Brutus and Cassius, who were even then recruiting a massive army of liberation in the East, he instead flitted despairingly from villa to villa, haunted, as he had been for so long, by the shadow of exile. After all, as Cato had taught him, there were nightmares worse than death. Trapped by his executioners at last, Cicero leaned out from his litter and bared his throat to the sword. This was the gesture of a gladiator, and one he had always admired. Defeated in the greatest and deadliest of all games, he unflinchingly accepted his fate. He died as he would surely have wished: bravely, a martyr to freedom and to freedom of speech.

Even his enemies knew that. When his severed head and hands were delivered by the bounty-hunters, Fulvia, Clodius’ widow and now Antony’s wife, hurried to gloat. Picking up the grisly souvenirs, she spat on Cicero’s head, then yanked out his tongue and stabbed it with a hairpin. Only when she had finished mutilating it was she willing to have the head exposed to the public. The hand that had written the great speeches against Antony was nailed up too. Silenced and pin-pricked as it was, exposed to the gaze of the Roman people, the tongue was eloquent still. Cicero had been the incomparable political orator of the Republic – and now the age of oratory and free politics was dead.

The Winner Takes It All

One year after the establishment of the triumvirate the last hopes for the survival of a free republic perished outside the Macedonian city of Philippi. Trapped and near starving on a Balkan plain, a Caesarian army once again succeeded in tempting its enemies into a fatal engagement. Brutus and Cassius had stripped the East of its legions, possessed command of the sea, and occupied an impregnable position: like Pompey at Pharsalus, they could well have afforded to bide their time. Instead, they chose to fight. In two battles on a scale more massive than any in Roman history first Cassius then Brutus fell on his sword. Other celebrated names also perished in the carnage: a Lucullus, a Hortensius, a Cato. The last of these, removing his helmet and charging into the depths of the Caesarian ranks, consciously followed his father in preferring death to slavery. So too did his sister. Back in Rome the austere and virtuous Porcia had been waiting for news of Philippi. When it arrived, and she learned that both her brother and her husband Brutus were dead, she slipped free from the grasp of her friends, who had feared what she might do, she ran to a brazier and swallowed burning coals. Women, after all, were Romans too.

But what would that mean in a state no longer free? Not, by definition, the old answer, that it was to value liberty above everything, even life itself. Heroic it may have been, but the grisly example of Porcia was not much emulated. Of those who had lived truest to the ideals of the Republic, most, now that stillness had settled again over Philippi, were dead. The loss of such citizens was impossible to make up, and all the more so because a disproportionate number of the casualties had come from the nobility. The heir to a famous name, in the universal opinion of the Roman people, bore the history of his city in his veins. This was why the extinction of a great house had always been regarded as a matter for public mourning – and why the scything of an entire generation of the nobility, whether at the hands of executioners or amid the dust and flies of Macedon, was a calamity fatal to the Republic. More, much more, than blood had been spilled.

Of the victorious triumvirs, it was Antony who sensed this most clearly. He had come of age at a time when liberty had been something more than just a slogan, and he was not incapable of mourning its death. Searching out the corpse of Brutus on the battlefield of Philippi, he had covered it respectfully with a cloak, then had it cremated, and sent the ashes to Servilia. Nor, now his supremacy was secured, did he abuse it with further bloodbaths. Rather than return to misery-stricken Italy, he elected, as the senior partner in the triumvirate, to stay in the East and play at being Pompey the Great. His pleasures, as he progressed through Greece and Asia, were those that had long been traditional among the Republic’s proconsuls: posing as a lover of Greek culture while leeching the Greeks; patronising local princelings; fighting the Parthians. To die-hard republicans, this was all reassuringly familiar, and gradually, in the months and years that followed Philippi, the shattered remnants of Brutus’ armed forces would gravitate, faute de mieux, towards Antony. With him, in the East, the cause of legitimacy licked its wounds as its life-blood ebbed away.

For only in Rome could there be any hope of restoring a free republic – and Rome was in the hands of a man who appeared its deadliest enemy. Chill and vengeful, Octavian was the man whom those defeated at Philippi chiefly reviled as the murderer of liberty. On the battlefield, brought past their conquerors in chains, the republican prisoners had saluted Antony courteously, but the youthful Caesar they had cursed and jeered. Nor, in the years following Philippi, had Octavian’s reputation grown any the less sinister. With Lepidus sidelined by his two colleagues to Africa, and Antony lording it over the East, it was to the youngest member of the triumvirate that the most invidious task had fallen: finding land for the returning war veterans. With some three hundred thousand battle-hardened soldiers waiting to be settled, Octavian could not afford to delay the programme; nor, for all the efficiency he brought to executing it, could he avoid inflicting on the countryside the miseries of social revolution. Respect for private property had always been one of the foundation-stones of the Republic, but now, with the Republic superseded, private property could be sequestered on a commissar’s whim. Farmers, evicted from their land without recompense, might find themselves abducted into slave-pens, or else, lacking any other means of subsistence, end up as brigands themselves. As in the time of Spartacus, Italy became bandit land. With armed gangs daring to raid even towns and cities, rioting flared, impotent explosions of suffering and despair. Amid all the upheaval crops failed and harvests were lost. As the countryside slipped into anarchy, so Rome began to starve.

The famine was worsened by a familiar plague. More than twenty years after Pompey had swept the pirates from the sea, they were back – and this time their chief was Pompey’s own son. Sextus, having escaped Caesar’s vengeance in Spain, had profited from the chaos of the times to establish himself as the master of Sicily, and the admiral of two hundred and fifty ships. Preying on the shipping lanes, he was soon throttling Rome. As the citizens grew gaunt with hunger, so the flesh peeled off the city’s bones too. Shops were boarded up, temples left to crumble, monuments stripped of their gold. Everywhere, what had once been scenes of luxury were converted to the needs of war. Even Baiae, bright and glittering Baiae, rang to the hammers of Octavian’s engineers. On the neighbouring Lucrine Lake, a naval dockyard was built over the fabled oyster beds – a desecration worthy of the times. History itself appeared diminished; and epic, repeating a familiar storyline, was reduced to shrunken parody. Once again a Pompey fought a Caesar, but they both seemed, in comparison to their giant fathers, dwarfish thieves. A pirate and a gangster: fitting generals to scrap over a city no longer free.

Yet, although Sextus was a constant menace and more than capable of bringing misery to his country, he was never a fatal threat to the Caesarians. A much greater danger, and one that cast its shadow over the entire world, was that just as the first triumvirate had finally torn itself to pieces, so too might the second. In 41 BC, only months after Octavian’s return from Philippi, this came perilously close to happening. With Antony absent in the East, his wife, the ever pugnacious Fulvia, stirred up a rebellion in Italy. Octavian, responding with swift and calculated atrocities, only just succeeded in repressing it. His revenge on Fulvia herself, however, was limited to the penning of abusive verses on the subject of her nymphomania. His power in Italy was still precarious, and he could not risk provoking Antony. Fulvia was permitted to leave for the East and her husband.

Conveniently, however, she died before she could join him. In September 40 BC Antony’s agents and those of Octavian met in uneasy truce at Brundisium. After much haggling the pact between the two men was reconfirmed. To cement it, Octavian gave to the widower the hand of his beloved sister, Octavia. Rome’s empire, far more neatly than it had been before, was now sliced in two. Only Sextus and Lepidus still obscured the division – and they were soon swept from the gaming board.

In September 36 BC Octavian finally succeeded in destroying the fleet of Sextus, who fled to the East and ultimate execution at the hands of Antony’s agents. At the same time, when Lepidus pushed his resentment at being sidelined too far, he was formally stripped of his triumviral powers, a humiliation staged by Octavian without any reference to the third member of the partnership. The young Caesar, now more firmly established in Rome than his adoptive father had ever been, could afford to shrug aside Antony’s inevitable protests. Still only twenty-seven, he had come far. Not only Rome, nor only Italy, but half the world now acknowledged his rule.

Yet his – and Antony’s – mastery remained that of a despot. The triumvirate, which had been hurriedly renewed in 37 after its expiry the year before, had no foundations in precedent, only in the exhaustion and misery of the Roman people. The sense of helplessness that the Republic had inspired in other peoples was now its own. As early as 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination, one of his friends had warned that Rome’s problems were intractable – ‘for if a man of such genius was unable to find a way out, who will find one now?’¹⁷ Since then the Roman people had found themselves ever more storm-racked and adrift. The lodestars of custom were gone, and there seemed nothing to take their place.

No wonder, then, that despair and dislocation should have begun to breed in the Republic’s citizens strange fantasies:

Now comes the crowning age foretold in the Sibyl’s songs

,

A great new cycle, bred of time, begins again.

Now virginal Justice and the golden age returns

,

Now its first-born is sent down from high heaven.

With the birth of this boy, the generation of iron will pass

,

And a generation of gold will inherit all the world.¹⁸

These lines were written in 40 BC, in the very teeth of Italy’s suffering. Their author, P. Vergilius Maro – Virgil – was from the fertile basin of the River Po, an area where the land commissars had been particularly active. In other poems Virgil had hauntingly depicted the miseries of the dispossessed, nor was his vision of Utopia any the less despairing in its inspiration. Such had been the scale of the catastrophe that had overtaken the Roman people that vague prophetic longings of the kind that Greeks or Jews had long indulged in appeared the only consolations left to them. ‘The Sibyl’s songs’: these were not the Sibyl’s songs as they appeared in the books on the Capitol. They contained no prescription for appeasing the gods’ anger, no programme for restoring peace to the Republic. They were dreams, nothing more.

And yet dreams, to autocrats, had their uses. Whatever Virgil’s talk of messianic babies sent from heaven, there were clearly only two candidates for the role of saviour – and of these two, it was Antony, not Octavian, who had the most suggestive traditions ready to hand. The East, bled white by successive sides in Roman civil wars, yearned for a new beginning even more passionately than did Italy. Visions of apocalypse still swirled through the imaginings of Greeks and Egyptians, Syrians and Jews. Mithridates had demonstrated how an ambitious warlord could turn such hopes to his advantage; but no one had ever done so who was not an enemy of Rome. To present oneself as the saviour god long promised by eastern oracles: no more monstrous crime, for a citizen of the Republic, could possibly have been imagined. For more than a century now proconsuls had been travelling to the East, hearing themselves hailed as divine, mimicking Alexander, handing out crowns – and always dreaded to follow where such indulgences might lead. The Senate would not permit it; the Roman people would not permit it. But now the Republic was dead, and Antony was a triumvir, owing nothing to either the Senate or the Roman people. And temptation came in the form of a great and enchanting queen.

Cleopatra, who had won Caesar’s affections by hiding in a carpet, had wooed Antony with overblown spectacle from the start. She knew him of old – his flamboyance, his love of pleasure, his dressing-up as Dionysus – and had calculated accordingly how best to win his heart. In 41 BC, during Antony’s progress through the East, she had sailed from Egypt to meet him, her ship’s oars made of silver, its poop sheathed with gold, her pages dressed as Cupids, her handmaids as sea nymphs, herself as Aphrodite, goddess of love. Antony had summoned her – an unconscionable humiliation – but Cleopatra, wafting into his headquarters amid the goggling of its stupefied inhabitants, had magnificently turned the tables. Not that she had been foolish enough to hog the limelight for too long. Instead, she had presented Antony with his own part to play in the extravaganza. ‘And the word went out everywhere, that Aphrodite had come to feast with Dionysus, for the common good of Asia.’¹⁹ No role could have been better designed to tickle Antony’s fancy – no bed-partner either. Just as he had been intended to do, he had speedily made Cleopatra his mistress, and passed a delightful winter with her in Alexandria. Matrons back in Rome would swear by Egyptian methods of birth control, but Cleopatra – at least while taking world leaders to bed – had no time for fiddling around with diaphragms of crocodile dung. As with Caesar, so with Antony, she soon got herself pregnant. Having delivered Caesar a son, Cleopatra now went one better. Aphrodite gave Dionysus twins.

Here, for the father, was the glimmering of a perilous temptation. To found a line of kings: this was the ultimate, the deadliest taboo. No wonder that Antony turned his back on it. For four years – belying the gossip that he was besotted with Cleopatra – he avoided his mistress. Octavia, beautiful, intelligent and loyal, provided him with ample compensations, and for a while – settled in Athens, attending lectures with his intellectual bride – Antony presented a model of uxoriousness. Yet even when with Octavia he could not forget the more glittering possibilities to which Cleopatra had opened his eyes. Outrageous stories began to be told: that Antony was holding orgies in the theatre of Dionysus, dressed like the god in a fetching panther skin; that he was leading torchlit processions up to the Parthenon; that he was pestering the goddess Athena with drunken marriage proposals. All most un-Roman – and the stories were no doubt much improved by the retelling. Not that there was any great scandal in Athens, or among the rest of Antony’s subjects. Just the opposite, in fact: in the East it was rather expected that a ruler be a god.

By 36 BC, when Antony and Octavian faced each other as twin masters of the Roman world, undistracted by rivals, the character of their rule was being influenced ever more by the different traditions of their power bases. For both men the challenge was the same: to secure a legitimacy that was not merely of the sword. Here Octavian, as the ruler of the West, had a crucial advantage. Both he and Antony were Roman, but only he had Rome. When Octavian returned to the capital from the defeat of Sextus he was greeted, for the first time, with genuine enthusiasm. The innate conservatism of his fellow citizens had survived the loss of their freedom, and now, grateful for the peace that Octavian had won them, they paid homage in the language of their ancient rights. They offered the conqueror a sacred privilege: the inviolability of a tribune. Only in a restored Republic would this have any meaning – and Octavian, by accepting it, was signalling his anticipation of just such a prospect. Not that this guaranteed anything, of course, for by now the Romans had learned better than to put their trust in rhetorical flourishes. Even so, with Sextus’ fleet sunk and Lepidus banished in ignominious retirement, Octavian could at last start to flesh out his claims to be labouring in the cause of peace. Taxes were rescinded, grain supplies re-established, commissioners appointed to bring order to the countryside. Documents relating to the civil wars were ostentatiously burned. The annual magistrates began to have their responsibilities restored. Back to the future indeed.

But not all the way, of course – not yet. Octavian had no intention of surrendering his triumviral powers while Antony held on to his, and for Antony, far distant from his native city, the restoration of the Republic hardly registered as a pressing issue. Instead, his ambitions were tending in a very different direction. For three hundred years, ever since Alexander, dreams of universal empire had haunted the imaginings of the Greeks, dreams that the Republic too, in the end, had come to share. Yet its suspicion of them had lingered, and even the greatest of its citizens – even Pompey, even Caesar himself – had feared to pursue them to the limits. So too had Antony – who had fled the temptings of a Macedonian queen to become the husband of a sober Roman matron. But four years had passed, four years of naked power such as no citizen had ever exercised in the East before – and the temptations, as they were fed, continued to gnaw. In the end Antony proved too self-indulgent, too besotted by his own pretensions, to resist them. Octavia – who was to remain loyal to her husband’s memory to the very end – was sent back to Rome. Meanwhile, once again, Aphrodite was summoned to the presence of the new Dionysus.

This time there was to be no backtracking from the affair. In Rome the scandal exploded. Ever since the Republic had begun involving itself in the affairs of the East there had been nothing more calculated to generate moral outrage than the spectacle of a citizen going native – and Antony, if reports were to be believed, was going native with a vengeance. The horrors of his behaviour seemed to have no limits. Why, he used a golden chamberpot, sheltered himself on the parade ground beneath mosquito nets, even massaged his mistress’s feet! Extravagance, effeminacy, servility: the charge-sheet was a familiar one to any Roman politician. Antony, playing the bluff man of the world, chose to treat it all with disdain. ‘So what if I’m fucking the Queen?’ he complained to Octavian. ‘What does it matter where you shove your erection?’²⁰

But Antony was being disingenuous. His offences were not limited to the field of sex. Nor, even though the slanders that branded Cleopatra a whore were a staple of Roman misogyny, were they necessarily to be discounted for that reason. Her enemies were right to fear her, and to mistrust her seductions. These were not merely, as the cruder propagandists had it, the delights of her body, but charms more insidious and perilous by far. When Cleopatra whispered into Antony’s ear, her most honeyed words were not of sensual pleasure, but promises of godhead and universal empire.

And Antony, smitten by such dreams, began to trample where even Caesar had feared to tread. Having previously turned his back on dynastic ambitions, he now began to parade them. First, he acknowledged his children by Cleopatra. Then he gave them provocative, even inflammatory, titles: Alexander Helios, ‘the Sun’, and Cleopatra Selene, ‘the Moon’. Mingling the divine with the dynastic, these names may have been suited to Alexandria, but they could not have been more calculated to raise hackles back in Rome. Did Antony even care? His fellow citizens, watching him pander to the cheers of servile Greeks and Orientals, frowned in perplexity. And then, just when it seemed as though his offensiveness could go no further, came his – and Cleopatra’s – most spectacular stunt of all.

In 34 BC the crowds of Alexandria were invited to witness the inauguration of a dazzling new world order. The ceremony was presided over by Antony, Roman triumvir and new Dionysus. By his side sat Cleopatra, Macedonian queen and Egyptian pharaoh, splendidly robed as the new Isis, mistress of the heavens. Before them, arrayed in equally exotic national dress, stood Cleopatra’s children by both Caesar and Antony. To the Alexandrians, these princes and princesses were presented as saviour-gods, the inheritors of a dawning universal harmony, long promised, now drawing near. Young Alexander, garbed as a Persian king of kings, was promised Parthia and all the realms beyond it. Other children, more modestly, were presented with territories that it was actually within the power of Antony to give. The fact that some of these were provinces of the Republic, held in trust for the Roman people, failed to inhibit his generosity. This was partly because, in one sense, he was not being generous at all. Antony had no real intention of handing over the administration of Roman provinces to his children, and to that extent at least the ceremony was show and nothing more. But show mattered – and the message Antony had wished it to proclaim could also be found on his silver coins, jingling in purses throughout the East. His head stamped on one side, Cleopatra’s on the other: a Roman and a Greek; a triumvir and a queen. A new age was dawning in which Roman rule would be blended into what the Sibyl had prophesied: the divinely ordained synthesis of East and West, all differences shrunk, presided over by an emperor and an empress of the world.

But Alexandria’s meat, of course, was the Republic’s poison. Back in Rome, Antony’s friends – of whom there were still many – were appalled. Antony himself, alerted to the public-relations disaster, hurriedly wrote to the Senate. He offered, in a grand but vague manner, to lay down his triumviral powers – to restore the Republic. But too late. The gleaming white toga of constitutionalism had already been filched. Distracted as he had been by his grandiose Eastern dreams, Antony turned his gaze back to Rome to discover a most disconcerting sight: the heir of Caesar, adventurer and terrorist, posing resplendent as the defender of the Republic, the champion of tradition and his people’s ancient freedoms. And not only posing, but carrying the role off with great style.

True, not everyone was convinced by the young Caesar’s impersonation of a constitutionalist – and the mask itself might still occasionally slip. In 32 BC, wishing to browbeat the consuls, both of whom were supporters of Antony, Octavian entered the Senate House with armed guards and stationed them menacingly behind the magistrates’ chairs of state. The show of strength had the desired effect: opponents of Octavian’s regime were immediately smoked out. The two consuls fled to Antony in the East, and with them went almost a third of the Senate, some three hundred senators in all. Many of these were Antony’s placemen, but some, the heirs to a ruined cause, had more principled reasons for refusing to stomach a Caesar as the shield of the Republic. One of the two consuls who fled to Antony, for instance, was Domitius Ahenobarbus, the son of Julius Caesar’s old foe. Also in Antony’s camp – inevitably – was the grandson of Cato.

Octavian jeered at their choice of loyalties. That such men should end up as courtiers to a queen! Domitius actually made a point of snubbing Cleopatra whenever he could, and was constantly urging Antony to send her packing back to Egypt, but Octavian had always been a master at landing punches below the belt. In the summer of 32 BC, tipped off by a renegade, he even took the supremely sacrilegious step of raiding the temple of Vesta, where Antony had deposited his will, and seizing the document from the hands of the Vestal Virgins. The contents, eagerly pored over, duly proved as explosive as Octavian had anticipated. Stern-faced and censorious, he listed them for the benefit of the Senate. Caesarion to be legitimised; Cleopatra’s children awarded vast legacies; Antony himself, on his death, to be buried by Cleopatra’s side. It was all very shocking – perhaps suspiciously so.

Yet if there was much that was factitious about Octavian’s propaganda, it was not all spin. Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra, formalised in 32 when he divorced Octavia, was instinctively recognised by most Romans for what it was – a betrayal of the Republic’s deepest principles and values. That the Republic itself was dead did not make these any less mourned, nor its prejudices any less savage. To surrender to what was unworthy of a citizen: this was what the Romans had always most dreaded. It was flattering, therefore, to a people who had become unfree to pillory Antony as unmanly and a slave to a foreign queen. For the last time, the Roman people could gird themselves for war and imagine that both the Republic and their own virtue were not, after all, entirely dead.

Many years later Octavian would boast, ‘The whole of Italy, unprompted, swore allegiance to me, and demanded that I lead her into war. The provinces of Gaul, Spain, Africa, Sicily and Sardinia also swore the same oath.’²¹ Here, in the form of a plebiscite spanning half the world, was something utterly without precedent, a display of universalism consciously designed to put that of Antony and Cleopatra in the shadow, drawn from the traditions not of the East but of the Roman Republic itself. Undisputed autocrat and champion of his city’s most ancient ideals, Octavian sailed to war as both. It was a combination that was to prove irresistible. When, for the third time in less than twenty years, two Roman forces met head to head in the Balkans, it was a Caesar, yet again, who emerged triumphant. Throughout the summer of 31 BC, with his fleet rotting in the shallows and his army rotting with disease, Antony was blockaded on the eastern coast of Greece. His camp began to empty – dispiritingly, even Domitius was among the deserters. Finally, when the stench of defeat had grown too overpowering for Antony to ignore any longer, he decided to make a desperate throw. On 2 September he ordered his fleet to attempt a break-out, past the Cape of Actium, into the open sea. For much of the day the two great fleets faced each other, motionless in the silence of the crystalline bay. Then suddenly, in the afternoon, there was movement: Cleopatra’s squadron darting forwards, smashing its way through a gap in Octavian’s line, slipping free. Antony, abandoning his giant flagship for a swifter vessel, followed, but most of his fleet was left behind, his legions too. They quickly surrendered. With this brief, inglorious battle perished all of Antony’s dreams, and all the hopes of the new Isis. And for days afterwards the waves washed gold and purple on to the shore.

One year later Octavian closed in for the kill. In July 30 BC his legions appeared before Alexandria. The following evening, as twilight deepened towards midnight, the noise of invisible musicians was heard floating in a procession through the city, then upwards to the stars. ‘And when people reflected on this mystery, they realised that Dionysus, the god whom Antony had always sought to imitate and copy, had abandoned his favourite.’²² The next day Alexandria fell. Antony, botching his suicide in the manner of Cato, died in his lover’s arms. Cleopatra, having discovered that Octavian planned to parade her in chains for his triumph, followed him nine days later. As befitted a pharaoh, she died of a cobra bite, the poison of which, the Egyptians believed, bestowed immortality. It was, for the would-be emperor and empress of the world, a suitably multicultural end.

The scare that Cleopatra had given Rome doomed her dynasty. Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, was quietly executed, the Ptolemies themselves officially deposed. On temples across Egypt artisans began sculpting the image of their new king: Octavian himself. Henceforward, the country would be ruled not as an independent kingdom, nor even as a Roman province – although the new pharaoh liked to pretend otherwise – but as a private fiefdom. Later, Octavian would boast of his mercy: ‘When it was safe to pardon foreign people I preferred to preserve them rather than wipe them out.’²³ Alexandria was the greatest city to have fallen to a Roman general since Carthage, but its fate was far different. Ruthless in the pursuit of power, Octavian was to prove himself cool and cynical in the exercising of it. Alexandria was too rich, too much of a honeypot, to destroy. Even the statues of Cleopatra escaped being smashed.

Such clemency, of course, was the prerogative of a master, a demonstration of his greatness and power. All the world had fallen into Octavian’s hands, and now that he had no rivals, bloodshed and savagery had ceased to serve his purpose. ‘I am reluctant to call mercy’, wrote Seneca almost a century later, ‘what was really the exhaustion of cruelty.’²⁴ But Octavian, if he were exhausted, could not afford to show it. Visiting the tomb of Alexander, he accidentally knocked off the corpse’s nose. In a similar manner he chipped at the conqueror’s reputation. The greatest challenge, Octavian argued sternly, was not the winning of empire but the ordering of it. He spoke with authority, for this was the challenge he had set himself. No longer to butcher but to spare; no longer to fight but to provide peace; no longer to destroy but to restore.

Such, at any rate as he sailed home, Octavian was pleased to claim.

The Republic Restored

The Ides of January 27 BC. The Senate House seething with anticipation. Senators, crowded on to benches, whispering urgently among themselves. A historic announcement, it appeared, was due. Not only had it been widely trailed, but there were some senators, the leading members of the house, who had been tipped off about the response that was expected. Waiting for the consul to begin his speech, they readied themselves to look surprised, while rehearsing stage-managed answers beneath their breath.

Suddenly, a falling away of voices. The consul, slight still, only thirty-five, rising to his feet. Hushed silence for him, the young Caesar, the saviour of the state. Composed as ever, he began to address the chamber. His words were measured, cool – and freighted with moment. Civil war, he announced, had been extinguished. The extraordinary powers awarded to him – true, by universal consent, but unconstitutional all the same – could no longer be justified. His mission had been accomplished, the Republic had been saved, and so now, at long last, after the worst and most convulsive crisis in its history, the time had come to hand it back to whom it belonged: the Senate and people of Rome.

As he sat down, murmurs of unease, swelling steadily. The leaders of the Senate began to protest. Why, having rescued the Roman people from otherwise certain ruin, was Caesar planning to abandon them now? Yes, he had announced the restoration of constitutional proprieties, and the Senate was duly grateful. But why, just because the traditions of the Republic were set to flourish again, did this mean that Caesar had to resign his guardianship of the state? Did he wish to condemn his people to eternal anarchy and civil war? For this, without him, would surely be their fate!

Perhaps, rather than abandon the Republic to disaster, he would therefore listen to a counter-proposal? Caesar had declared illegal any of his acts or honours that were contrary to the constitution; very well, then let him, just like any consul, be awarded a province. One that would bring with it twenty-odd legions, true, and include Spain, Gaul, Syria, Cyprus and Egypt – but a province, none the less. And let him hold it for ten years, not an unheard-of length of time, after all – for had not Caesar’s father, the great Julius, held office for a decade in Gaul? Nothing to offend precedent there. The Republic would flourish and Caesar would fulfil his responsibilities to Rome, and the gods would smile on both. Throughout the Senate there rose a roar of assent.

Who was Octavian to refuse such an appeal? The Republic needed him, so, graciously, as was his duty as a citizen, he announced that, yes, he was prepared to shoulder the burden. The gratitude of the Senate knew no bounds. Magnanimity as great as Caesar’s merited spectacular rewards. These were duly voted him. It was agreed that bay leaves should be wreathed over the doorposts of his house, and a civic crown fixed over its door. A golden shield was to be placed in the Senate House, listing his qualities of courage, mercy, justice and sense of duty – time-tested Roman virtues all. And then there was one final honour, novel and supreme, as was only fitting. It was decreed that Caesar should henceforward be known as ‘Augustus’.

This, for the man born Gaius Octavius, was the culmination of an entire career spent collecting impressive names. A Caesar at the age of nineteen, he had gone one better two years later when, following his adoptive father’s official deification, he had begun calling himself ‘Divi Filius’ – ‘Son of a God.’ Extraordinary though such a name was, it had evidently met with divine approval, for the career of Caesar Divi Filius had never ceased to be blessed with success. Now, as ‘Augustus’, he would be distinguished even further from the common run of mortals. The title would veil him like a nimbus in a glow of unearthly power. ‘For it signified that he was something more than human. All the most sacred and honoured things are described as “august”’.²⁵

Including Rome herself. A famous phrase, lodged in the mind of every citizen, asserted that the city had been ‘founded with august augury’²⁶ – and now, by becoming Augustus, Octavian had made this phrase his own. To found Rome anew – here was his lifetime’s mission, and every time his fellow citizens spoke his name, they would be reminded of it. The artful, almost subliminal, nature of such an association was entirely calculated, for tempted as Octavian had been by the more obvious name of ‘Romulus’, he had rejected it: the first founder of Rome had been a king and had killed his brother, unfortunate details both. Now that Octavian held supreme power, anything that might jog memories of how he had won it was to be suppressed. Already, eighty silver statues, voted him the previous decade by an obsequious Senate, had been melted down. In official commemorations of his career, the years between Philippi and Actium were left a blank. And most crucially of all, of course, the name ‘Octavian’ itself was to be buried in oblivion. Augustus Caesar perfectly understood the importance of rebranding.

And he understood it because he understood the Roman people themselves. Augustus had shared in their deepest dreams and desires. That, after all, was what had won him the world. Last and greatest of the Republic’s strongmen, he had recognised, with the pitiless eye of a pathologist, the malignancy corrupting his city’s noblest ideals – nor had he ever ceased to exploit it. ‘Always fight bravely, and be superior to others,’ Posidonius had admonished Pompey, citing the impeccable authority of Homer. But the age of heroes was past, and the desire to fight bravely and to be superior to others might now encompass the ruin of Rome. The stakes had grown so high, the resources available to the ambitious so immense, the methods open to them so devastating and lethal, that they had brought the Republic and all its empire to the point of annihilation. No longer a polity of citizens bound by shared assumptions and restraints, Rome had become an anarchy of head-hunters in which only the cruel and fratricidal could hope to advance. This was the hunting-ground into which Octavian, just nineteen, had thrown himself – and there could be no doubt that his aim, from the outset, had been to seize mastery of the state. Having achieved that, however, with his rivals dead or tamed and his people exhausted, he had next faced a momentous decision. Either to continue trampling on the traditions of his city’s past, to wield power nakedly with a sword, as a warlord, perhaps, like his father, like Antony, as a god – or to cast himself as the heir of tradition. By becoming ‘Augustus’ he signalled his choice. He would rule not against the grain of the Republic but with it. He would instruct his countrymen in an ancient lesson: that ambition, if not pursued for the general good, might be a crime. And he himself, the ‘best guardian of Romulus’ people’,²⁷ would revitalise the ideals of citizenship so that never again would they over-reach themselves and degenerate into savagery and civil war.

Hypocrisy of an Olympian order, of course, but Romulus’ people were no longer in a condition much to care. Citizens now imagined their doom inexorable.

What does the bloodthirsty passage of time not leech away?

Our parents’ generation, worse than their parents

’,

Has given birth to us, worse yet – and soon

We will have children still more depraved

.

²⁸

This was a pessimism bred of more than war-weariness. The old certainties of what it meant to be a Roman had been poisoned, and a confused and frightened people despaired of what had once bound them together: their honour, their love of glory, their military ardour. Freedom had betrayed them. The Republic had lost its liberty, but worse, it had lost its soul. Or so the Romans feared.

The challenge – and the great opportunity – for Augustus was to persuade them of the opposite. Do that and the foundations of his regime would be secure. A citizen who could restore to his fellows not only peace, but also their customs, their past and their pride would rank as august indeed. But he could not do it simply by legislating, ‘for what use are empty laws without traditions to animate them?’²⁹ Decrees on their own would not resurrect the Republic. Only the Roman people, by proving themselves worthy of Augustus’ labours, could do that – and therein lay the genius and the greatness of the policy. The new era could be cast as a moral challenge of the kind that the Romans had so often faced – and risen to triumphantly – in the past. Augustus, claiming no more authority than was due to him by virtue of his achievements and prestige, summoned his countrymen to share with him the heroic task of revitalising the Republic. He encouraged them, in short, to feel like citizens again.

And the programme was funded, as was traditional, with the gold of the defeated. The realisation of Augustus’ dreams was to be paid for, fittingly, out of the ruin of Cleopatra’s. In 29 BC Octavian had returned to Rome from the East with the fabled treasure of the Ptolemies in his cargo-holds – and had immediately begun spending it. Huge tranches of land were bought up, in Italy and throughout the provinces, so that Augustus would never again have to commit the terrible crime of his youth: settling his veterans on confiscated property. Nothing had caused more misery and dislocation, and nothing had struck more brutally at the Romans’ sense of themselves. Now, at enormous expense, Augustus worked to expiate his offence. ‘The assurance of every citizen’s property rights’ was to be an enduring slogan of the new regime, and one that did much to underpin its widespread popularity. To the Romans, security of tenure was a moral as much as a social or economic good. Those who benefited from its return saw it as hailing nothing less than a new golden age: ‘cultivation restored to the fields, respect to what is sacred, freedom from anxiety to mankind’.³⁰

Yet this golden age would impose duties on those who enjoyed it. Unlike the Utopia described by Virgil, it would not be a paradise purged of toil and danger. That would hardly serve to breed hardy citizens. Augustus had not invested the treasure of the Ptolemies merely to encourage his countrymen to lounge around like effeminate Orientals. Instead, his fantasy was the old one of all Roman reformers: to renew the rugged virtues of the ancient peasantry, to bring the Republic back to basics. It struck a deep chord, for this was the raw stuff of Roman myth: nostalgia for a venerated past, yes, but simultaneously a spirit harsh and unsentimental, the same that had forged generations of steel-hard citizens and carried the Republic’s standards to the limits of the world. ‘Back-breaking labour, and the urgings of tough poverty – these can conquer anything!’³¹ So Virgil had written, while Octavian, in the East, was defeating Cleopatra and bringing an end to the civil wars. No vision of an indolent paradise now, but something more ambiguous, challenging – and, by Roman lights, worthwhile. Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. Struggle had been her existence, and the defiance of disaster. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation that history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.

For what was Caesar Augustus himself, after all, if not the heir of a refugee? Long before there had been such a city as Rome, Prince Aeneas, the son of Venus, the ancestor of the Julian clan, had fled burning Troy and voyaged with his small fleet to Italy, his quest, given him by Jupiter, to make a new beginning. It was from Aeneas and his Trojans that the Roman people had eventually sprung, and in their souls it could be imagined they still retained something of the wanderer. Not to be content with what they had, but always to strive and fight for more, this had been the destiny of the Republic’s citizens – and it gave to Augustus and his mission a time-hallowed glow.

In the Romans’ beginning was their end. In 29 BC, the same year that Octavian returned from the East to push forward his programme of regeneration, Virgil started a poem on the theme of Aeneas. This was to become the great epic of the Roman people, an exploration both of their primordial roots and of their recent history. Like spectres, famous names out of the future haunt the vision of the Trojan hero: Caesar Augustus, naturally, ‘son of a god, who brings back the age of gold’,³² but others too – Catiline, ‘trembling at the faces of the Furies’, and Cato, ‘giving laws to the just’.³³When Aeneas, shipwrecked off the African coast, neglects his god-given duties to the future of Rome and dallies instead with Dido, the Queen of Carthage, the reader is troubled by knowing what will happen to the Trojan’s descendants, Julius Caesar and Antony; Carthage shimmers and elides with Alexandria; Dido with Cleopatra, a second fatal queen. What is gone and what is to come, both cast their shadows, one on the other, meeting, merging, separating again. When Aeneas sails up the Tiber, cattle low in the field that, a thousand years hence, will be the site of the Forum of Augustus’ Rome.

To the Romans themselves, who remained a conservative people despite all the upheavals of repeated civil wars, there was nothing startling about the perception that the past might shadow the present. The unique achievement of Augustus, however, was the brilliance with which he colonised both. His claim to be restoring their lost moral greatness to them stirred in the Romans deep sensibilities and imaginings that at their profoundest could inspire a Virgil, and make their landscape once again a sacred and myth-haunted place. But these yearnings also served other, more programmatic purposes. They encouraged veterans, for instance, to remain on their farms and not come endlessly flocking to Rome; to be content with their lot, leaving their swords to rust in the lofts of their barns. And over the vast tracts of the countryside that remained the property of agri-business, worked by chain-gangs of slaves, they cast a veil woven of fantasy.

What is happiness? – opting out of the rat race

,

Just like the ancient race of men

,

Tilling ancestral fields with your own team of oxen

,

Spared the horror of overdrafts

,

Not a soldier, blood pumping at the fierce trumpet

,

Not trembling at the angry sea.³⁴

So wrote Virgil’s friend Horace, with delicate irony, for he perfectly appreciated that his vision of the good life bore little relation to the realities of existence in the countryside. Yet it was no less precious to him for that. Horace had fought on the losing side in the civil wars, running away ingloriously from Philippi, and returning to Italy to find his father’s farm confiscated. Like his political loyalties, his dreams of a modest villa, of a life lived close to the land, were bred of nostalgia, no matter how self-mockingly expressed. Augustus, who never held Horace’s youthful indiscretions against him, offered the poet friendship and made an investment in his dreams. Even as the new regime was parcelling out the huge estates of fallen Antonians to its supporters, it was also subsidising Horace in an idyllic existence outside Rome, complete with garden, spring and little wood. Horace himself was too subtle, too independent, to be bought as a propagandist, but crude propaganda was not what Augustus wanted from him, nor from Virgil. For generations Rome’s leading citizens had been tortured by the need to choose between self-interest and traditional ideals. Augustus, with his genius for squaring circles, simply made himself the patron of both.

And he could do this because, like any star performer, he had the pick of roles he wanted. Only the reality could not be acknowledged: Augustus had no wish to end up murdered on the Senate House floor. Instead, with the willing collaboration of his fellow citizens, who flinched from staring the truth in the face, he veiled himself in robes garnered from the antique lumber-box of the Republic, refusing any magistracy not sanctioned by the past, and often not holding any magistracy at all. Authority, not office, was what counted: that mysterious quality that had given to Catulus or to Cato his prestige. ‘In all the qualities that make up a man,’ Cicero had once acknowledged, ‘M. Cato was first citizen.’³⁵ ‘First citizen’ – ‘princeps’: Augustus let it be known that he could wish for no prouder title. The son of Julius Caesar was to be regarded as the heir of Cato too.

And he pulled it off. No wonder that Augustus boasted of his skills as an actor. Only a man with a supreme talent for dissimulation could have played such various parts so subtly – and with such success. On his signet-ring, the princeps carried the image of a sphinx – and throughout his career he posed his countrymen a riddle. The Romans were used to citizens who vaunted their power, who exulted in the brilliance and glamour of their greatness – but Augustus was different. The more his grip tightened on the state, the less he flaunted it. Paradox, of course, had always suffused the Republic, and Augustus, insinuating himself into its heart, took on, chameleon-like, the same characteristic. The ambiguities and subtleties of civic life, its ambivalences and tensions, all were absorbed into the enigma of his own character and role. It was as though, in a crowning paradox, he had ended up as the Republic itself.

During his final illness, Augustus, by now a venerable seventy-five years old, asked his friends whether he had performed adequately ‘in the mime-show of life’.³⁶ That he had retained his hold on supreme power for more than forty years; that in all that time he had kept Rome, and the world with her, secure from civil war, claimed no special rank for himself that had not been sanctioned by the law, and had his legions stationed not around him but far away, among forests or deserts, on barbarous frontiers; that in the end he was dying not of dagger wounds, not at the base of an enemy’s statue, but peacefully in his bed: these were dazzling notices for any citizen to have. Yes, it could be reckoned that Augustus had put on a good show. After all, he had made himself the only star in town.

He died finally in the summer of AD 14 in Nola – the same city from which Sulla, a century earlier, had begun his fateful march on Rome. Escorted back to the capital by senators, borne at night to prevent it turning putrid, the corpse of Augustus was finally burned, as Sulla’s had been, on a great pyre in the Campus Martius. The old dictator, if his ghost still haunted the plain, would have found the setting dramatically altered from the one he had known while alive. Carried reverently from the smouldering pyre, the ashes of Caesar Augustus were laid to rest in his mausoleum, a tomb so enormous that it had been built complete with its own public park: both its scale and its circular form, it was said, had been inspired by the tomb of Alexander the Great. The Campus Martius, once the training-ground of Roman youth, was now one vast demonstration of the virtues of the Princeps. Of his magnanimity – for there, to the south, could still be seen Pompey’s theatre, the name and the trophies of Caesar’s enemy preserved by the grace of Caesar’s son. Of his benignity – for where once the Republic’s citizens had gathered to practise their weapons and be marshalled for war there now stood an Altar of Peace. And of his beneficence – for stretching even longer than Pompey’s theatre, a whole mile of gleaming porticoes, rose what had rapidly become, since its completion in 26 BC, Rome’s premier entertainment venue, where Augustus had staged some of the most lavish spectacles ever seen in the city. Officially, this was the voting hall, the Ovile, an extravagant upgrading of the old wooden pens into marble. But it was rarely used for voting. Instead, where the Roman people had once gathered to elect their magistrates, gladiators now fought and bizarre monsters – giant serpents, for instance, almost ninety feet long – were displayed. And if there were no shows, then citizens could always flock there for the luxury shopping.

The Republic had long been dead – now it was passing out of fashion too. ‘Shaggy simplicity is yesterday’s news. Rome’s made of gold,/And coins in all the wealth of the conquered globe.’³⁷ Greatness might have cost the Romans their freedom, but it had given them the world. Under Augustus their legions had continued to display all the martial qualities of old – pushing back the empire’s frontiers, slaughtering barbarians – but to the urbane consumer back on the Campus Martius, it was only distant noise. War no longer disturbed his reckoning. Nor, much, did morality, or duty, or the past. Nor, even, did warnings from the heavens. ‘Portents’, a contemporary historian noted with perplexity, ‘are never reported or chronicled nowadays.’³⁸ But for this there was a self-evident explanation: the gods, surveying the scene of leisure and peace that Rome had become, had clearly decided that there was nothing left for them to say.

‘The fruit of too much liberty is slavery’³⁹ had been the mournful judgement of Cicero – and who was to say that his own generation, the last of a free Republic, had not proved it true? But the fruit of slavery? That was for a new generation, and a new age, to prove.

Timeline

All dates are BC unless otherwise stated.

753

The foundation of Rome.

509

The downfall of the monarchy, and the establishment of the Republic.

390

The capture of Rome by the Gauls.

367

Legal restrictions on the right of plebeians to hold the consulship are abolished.

343–40

First Samnite war.

321

The Romans are defeated at the Caudine Forks.

290

The Romans complete the conquest of Samnium.

264–41

The first war against Carthage.

219–18

The start of the second war against Carthage. Hannibal marches on Italy, through southern Gaul, and across the Alps.

216

The battle of Cannae.

202

The defeat of Hannibal in Africa.

148

Macedon becomes a Roman province.

146

The destruction of Carthage and Corinth.

133

The tribunate and murder of Tiberius Gracchus. Attalus III of Pergamum leaves his kingdom to Rome in his will.

123

The first tribunate of Gaius Gracchus (starting on 10 December 124). Pergamum subjected to organised taxation.

122

The second tribunate of Gaius Gracchus.

121

The murder of Gaius Gracchus.

118

The establishment of a province in southern Gaul secures the land route to Spain. Probable birthdate of Lucullus.

115

Birth of Crassus.

112

Mithridates VI establishes himself as King of Pontus.

107

Marius’ first consulship. He abolishes property qualifications for recruitment to the army.

106

Birth of Pompey and Cicero.

104–100

Marius as Consul. Victorious campaigns against barbarian invaders from the north.

100

Birth of Caesar.

93

Birth of Clodius.

92

The conviction and exile of Rutilius Rufus for extortion.

91

Outbreak of the Italian revolt against Rome.

90

Citizenship offered to Italians loyal to Rome.

89

Sulla, campaigning in Samnium, brings an effective end to the Italian revolt. Mithridates invades the Roman province of Asia.

88

Sulla as consul. Marius, with the assistance of the tribune Sulpicius, has the Mithridatic command transferred to himself. Sulla marches on Rome. The execution of Sulpicius, and escape of Marius into exile. In Asia, Mithridates orders the massacre of 80,000 Romans and Italians.

87

Cinna as consul. Sulla leaves for Greece and the war against Mithridates. The death of Pompeius Strabo. Marius returns to power in Rome.

86

Cinna as consul. The death of Marius. Athens falls to Sulla.

85

Cinna as consul. Sulla signs a peace treaty with Mithridates.

84

Cinna as consul. He is murdered by mutineers.

83

Crassus joins Sulla in Greece. Sulla crosses to Italy, where he is joined by Pompey. The battle of the Colline Gate, and the massacre of the Samnite prisoners in the Villa Publica.

82

Proscriptions in Rome. Caesar in hiding.

81

Sulla as Dictator. He launches major constitutional reforms, including the hamstringing of the tribunate. Cicero’s first case.

80

Sulla as consul. Caesar leaves for military service in Asia.

79

Sulla relinquishes his magistracies. Cicero leaves on a two-year trip to the East.

78

Catulus as consul. The death of Sulla.

77

Pompey is given a command in Spain.

75

Cicero as quaestor. Mithridates declares war on Rome.

74

Lucullus as consul. Mithridates invades the province of Asia a second time. M. Antonius is given a command against the pirates.

73

The outbreak of a slave revolt, led by Spartacus. Lucullus expels Mithridates from Asia.

72

Crassus is appointed to command of the war against Spartacus. The end of Pompey’s campaigning in Spain. Lucullus is victorious against Mithridates in Pontus. M. Antonius is defeated by the pirates off Crete.

71

The defeat and death of Spartacus. The return of Pompey to Italy. Lucullus completes the conquest of Pontus. Mithridates takes refuge with Tigranes of Armenia.

70

Pompey and Crassus as consuls. Full powers are restored to the tribunate, after their abolition by Sulla. The prosecution of Verres.

69

The battle and sack of Tigranocerta.

68

Lucullus’ army mutinies. The birth of Cleopatra.

67

Pompey sweeps the seas clear of pirates.

66

Lucullus is replaced by Pompey as proconsul of the East. Cicero as praetor.

65

Caesar as aedile.

64

Pompey establishes Syria as a new Roman province. Cato as quaestor.

63

Cicero as consul. Caesar becomes

Pontifex Maximus.

Lucullus celebrates his triumph. Pompey storms Jerusalem. The death of Mithridates. The Catilinarian conspiracy, and execution of the ringleaders. Catiline raises an army in northern Italy. The birth of Octavian.

62

Caesar as praetor. The defeat and death of Catiline. Pompey returns to Italy. Clodius profanes the rites of the Good Goddess.

61

Caesar as governor in Spain. The trial and acquittal of Clodius. Pompey’s third triumph.

60

Caesar returns to Rome. The formation of an informal alliance between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus.

59

Caesar and Bibulus as consuls. ‘The First Triumvirate’. Pompey marries Julia, Caesar’s daughter. Clodius becomes a plebeian, and is elected to the tribunate.

58

Caesar campaigns against the Helvetians. Clodius as tribune. Cicero leaves Rome for exile, Cato for Cyprus.

57

Caesar campaigns against the Belgae. Street fighting between the gangs of Clodius and Milo. Cicero returns from exile.

56

The trial and acquittal of Caelius. The conference of Lucca, and the renewal of the Triumvirate. Cato returns to Rome from Cyprus.

55

Pompey and Crassus as consuls. Pompey dedicates his stone theatre. Caesar crosses the Rhine, then leads an expedition to Britain.

54

Domitius and Appius as consuls, Cato as praetor. Crassus leaves for Syria. Caesar leads a second expedition to Britain. The death of Pompey’s wife, Julia.

53

The battle of Carrhae, and the death of Crassus.

52

The murder of Clodius, and conviction of Milo. Pompey as sole consul until August. He marries Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio. Caelius as tribune. Vercingetorix leads Gaul in revolt against Caesar, but is defeated at Alesia, and surrenders.

50

Curio as tribune. The death of Hortensius. Pompey is called upon by the consul Marcellus to ‘rescue the Republic’.

49

Caesar crosses the Rubicon. The Senate evacuates Rome. Domitius surrenders Corfinium. Pompey leaves Italy for Greece. The defeat and death of Curio in Africa. Caesar defeats the Pompeian armies in Spain, and is elected dictator.

48

The deaths of Milo and Caelius. The battle of Pharsalus. The murder of Pompey. Caesar trapped in Alexandria.

47

Caesar’s cruise with Cleopatra down the Nile. The birth of Caesarion. Caesar defeats Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, returns to Italy, then crosses to Africa.

46

Caesar defeats Scipio. Cato commits suicide, Scipio drowns. Caesar celebrates four triumphs. Cleopatra arrives in Rome. Caesar leaves for Spain.

45

Caesar defeats the sons of Pompey, and returns to Rome. He publishes his

Anti-Cato.

44

Caesar is appointed dictator for life. Antony as consul. Caesar is assassinated on the ides of March. Octavian arrives in Rome. Brutus and Cassius leave for the East. Cicero delivers a series of speeches against Antony.

43

Hirtius and Pansa as consuls. They are killed in battle with Antony. The formation of the Second Triumvirate: Antony, Octavian and Lepidus. Octavian’s first consulship. The proscriptions. The death of Cicero.

42

The deification of Caesar. The battle of Philippi: the suicides of Brutus and Cassius.

41

Antony meets Cleopatra, then winters with her at Alexandria. Land sequestrations in Italy. War between Octavian and Fulvia.

40

Fulvia flees Italy, and dies. Antony and Octavian make peace, and Antony marries Octavian’s sister, Octavia. Cleopatra gives birth to twins.

37

Antony marries Cleopatra.

36

Lepidus is dropped from the Triumvirate. Sextus Pompeius is defeated, and flees to the East.

35

Death of Sextus Pompeius.

34

Antony hands out kingdoms and provinces to his children in Alexandria.

32

Octavia is divorced by Antony. Octavian seizes his will, and presents it to the Senate.

31

The battle of Actium.

30

The suicide of Antony and Cleopatra. Octavian captures Alexandria, and executes Caesarion. Ptolemaic rule in Egypt is brought to an end.

29

Virgil starts work on

The Aeneid.

27

Octavian is given the title ‘Augustus’. The Republic is ‘restored’.