The Story of Civilization

by Will Durant

  IV. ANOTHER CATO

  Amid all this corruption and laxity one man stood out as an exemplar and professor of the ancient ways. Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger had violated a precept of his great-great-grandfather by studying Greek; from it he derived that Stoic philosophy which shared with his republican convictions the inflexible devotion of his life. He inherited 120 talents ($432,000), but lived in sedulous simplicity. He lent money, but took no interest. He lacked his ancestor’s rough humor, and frightened people by what seemed to them his obstinate incorruptibility and his untimely addiction to principles. His life was an unforgivable indictment of theirs; they wished he would sin a little, if only out of a decent respect for the habits of mankind. They must have rejoiced when, with an almost Cynical conception of woman as a biological instrument, he “lent” his wife Marcia to his friend Hortensius—i.e., divorced her and assisted at her marriage to the orator—and later, when Hortensius died, took her again to wife.28 He could not be popular, for he was the relentless enemy of all dishonesty, the stern defender of the patria potestas, a more merciless censor moralium than Cato Censor himself. He seldom laughed or smiled, made no effort to be affable, and sharply reprimanded any who dared to flatter him. He was defeated for the consulship, said Cicero, because he acted like a citizen in Plato’s republic instead of a Roman living among “the dregs of Romulus’ posterity.”29

  As quaestor Cato made himself a terror to all incompetence and malfeasance, and guarded the Treasury ferociously from all political raids; nor did his watchfulness abate when his term expired. His indictments fell upon all parties and left him with a thousand admirers but hardly a friend. As praetor he persuaded the Senate to issue an order that all candidates, soon after election, must come into court and give under oath a detailed account of their expenses and proceedings in the campaign. The measure disturbed so many politicians, most of whom depended upon bribery, that they and their clients, when Cato next appeared in the Forum, reviled and stoned him; whereupon he climbed to the rostrum, faced the crowd resolutely, and talked them into submission. As tribune he led a legion into Macedonia; his attendants rode on horseback, he went on foot. He scorned the business classes and defended aristocracy, or rule by birth, as the only alternative to plutocracy, or rule by wealth. He warred without truce upon the men who were corrupting Roman politics with money, and Roman character with luxury; and he stood out to the last against every move, by either Pompey or Caesar, toward dictatorship. When Caesar had overthrown the Republic Cato died by his own hand, with a volume of philosophy by his side.

  V. SPARTACUS

  Misgovernment now reached a height, and democracy a depth, rare in the history of states. In 98 B.C.. the Roman general Didius repeated the exploit of Sulpicius Galba: he lured a whole tribe of troublesome natives into a Roman camp in Spain by pretending to register them for a distribution of land; when they had entered, with their wives and children, he had them all slaughtered. On his return to Rome he was awarded a public triumph.30 Shocked by the brutalities of empire, a Sabine officer in the Roman army, Quintus Sertorius, went over to the Spaniards, organized and drilled them, and led them to victory after victory over the legions sent to subdue him. For eight years (80-72) he ruled a rebel kingdom, winning the affection of the people by his just administration and by his establishment of schools for the education of native youth. Metellus, the Roman general, offered a hundred talents ($360,000) and 20,000 acres of land to any Roman who should kill him. Perpenna, a Roman refugee in Sertorius’ camp, invited him to dinner, assassinated him, and made himself master of the army that Sertorius had trained. Pompey was sent against Perpenna and easily defeated him; Perpenna was executed, and the exploitation of Spain was resumed.

  The next act of the revolution came not from the free but from the slave. Lentulus Batiates kept at Capua a school of gladiators—slaves or condemned criminals trained to fight animals, or one another, to the death in public arenas or private homes. Two hundred of them tried to escape; seventy-eight succeeded, armed themselves, occupied a slope of Vesuvius, and raided the adjoining towns for food (73). As their leader they chose a Thracian, Spartacus, “a man not only of high spirit and bravery,” says Plutarch, “but also in understanding and gentleness superior to his condition.”31 He issued a call to the slaves of Italy to rise in revolt; soon he had 70,000 men, hungering for liberty and revenge. He taught them to manufacture their own weapons, and to fight with such order and discipline that for years they outmatched every force sent to subdue them. His victories filled the rich men of Italy with fear, and its slaves with hope; so many of these tried to join him that after raising his army to 120,000 he refused further recruits, finding it difficult to care for them. He marched his horde toward the Alps, “intending, when he had passed them, that every man should go to his own home.”32 But his followers did not share these refined and pacific sentiments; revolting against his leadership, they began to loot the towns of northern Italy. The Senate now sent both consuls, with heavy forces, against the rebels. One army met a detachment that had seceded from Spartacus, and slaughtered it; the other attacked the main rebel body, and was defeated. Moving again toward the Alps, Spartacus encountered a third army, led by Cassius, and decimated it; but finding his way blocked by still other legions, he turned south and marched toward Rome.

  Half the slaves of Italy were on the verge of insurrection, and in the capital no man could tell when the revolution would break out in his very home. All that opulent society, which had enjoyed every luxury slavery could produce, trembled at the thought of losing everything—mastery, property, life. Senators and millionaires cried out for a better general; few offered themselves, for all feared this strange new foe. At last Crassus came forward and was given the command, with 40,000 men; and many of the nobility, not all forgetting the traditions of their class, joined him as volunteers. Knowing that he had an empire against him, and that his men could never administer either the Empire or the capital, Spartacus passed Rome by and continued south to Thurii, marching the length of Italy in the hope of transporting his men to Sicily or Africa. For a third year he fought off all attacks. But again his impatient soldiers rejected his authority and began to ravage the neighboring towns. Crassus came upon a horde of these marauders and slew them, 12,300 in number, every man fighting to the last. Meanwhile Pompey’s legions, returning from Spain, were sent to swell the forces of Crassus. Despairing of victory over such a multitude, Spartacus flung himself upon the army of Crassus and welcomed death by plunging into the midst of the foe. Two centurions fell by his hand; struck down and unable to rise, he continued the fight on his knees; at last he was so cut to pieces that his body could not later be identified. The great majority of his followers perished with him; some fled, and became hunted men in the woods of Italy; 6000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome (71). There their rotting bodies were left to hang for months, so that all masters might take comfort, and all slaves take heed.

  VI. POMPEY

  When Crassus and Pompey returned from this campaign they did not, as the Senate wished and law required, disband or disarm their troops at the gates. Camping outside the walls, they asked permission to stand for the consulate without entering the city—again a violation of precedent; in addition Pompey demanded land for his soldiers and a triumph for himself. The Senate refused, hoping to play one general against the other. But Crassus and Pompey joined hands, made a sudden alliance with the populares and the business class, and by generous bribery won election as consuls for 70 B.C. The magnates entered the partnership for two immediate ends: to recapture power in the juries that tried them, and to replace Lucullus—who had ruled the Roman East with unprofitable integrity—by a man of their own class and views. In Pompey they recognized their man.

  Pompey was now thirty-five, and already the veteran of many campaigns. Born of a rich equestrian family, he had won universal admiration by his courage and temperance, and his skill in every branch of sport and war. He had cleared
Sicily and Africa of Sulla’s enemies, and by his victories and his pride had earned from the humorous dictator the cognomen Magnus, the Great. He had achieved a triumph almost before a beard.33 He was so handsome that the courtesan Flora declared she could never part from him without a bite.34 He was sensitive and shy, and blushed when he had to address a public gathering, but in battle he was in these days impetuously brave; in later life timidity and corpulence burdened his generalship, and he hesitated till lost. His mind had neither brilliance nor depth; his policies were made for him, not by him—first by the politicians of the populares, then by the Senatorial oligarchy. His great wealth lifted him above the coarser temptations of politics; amid the selfishness and corruption of his time he shone by his patriotism and his integrity; he seems to have sincerely sought the public good as well as his own. His outstanding fault was vanity. His early successes led him to overrate his abilities, and he wondered why Rome waited so long to make him in everything but name a king.

  The two favorites of Sulla, now consuls together, devoted themselves to overthrowing the Sullan constitution. Pompey and Crassus paid their debt to the populares by passing a bill that restored all the power of the tribunes. They consolidated their alliance with business by directing Lucullus to give the publicans full charge of tax collections in the East; and they supported legislation that required juries to be drawn equally from the Senate, the equestrian class, and the tribunes of the Treasury. Crassus had to wait fifteen years for his reward—the privilege of drinking gold in Asia; Pompey received his in 67, when the Assembly voted him almost limitless authority to proceed against the pirates of Cilicia. Once Rhodes had kept the Aegean free of such marauders; but Rhodes, humiliated and impoverished by Rome and Delos, could no longer maintain the fleet required for such a service; and the landed aristocracy that controlled the Senate had no keen interest in making the channels of maritime commerce secure. Merchants and plebs felt the results more sharply: trade became almost impossible in the Aegean, even in the central Mediterranean; and imports of grain fell so rapidly that the price of wheat at Rome rose to twenty sesterces per modius, or three dollars a peck. The pirates flaunted their success with gilded masts, purple sails, and silver-plated oars on their thousand ships; they took and held 400 coastal towns, plundered temples in Samothrace, Samos, Epidaurus, Argos, Leucas, and Actium, kidnaped Roman officials, and assailed even the shores of Apulia and Etruria.

  To meet this situation Pompey’s friend Gabinius proposed a bill giving him for three years absolute control of all Roman fleets, and all persons within fifty miles of any Mediterranean shore. Every senator but Caesar opposed this extraordinary measure, but the Assembly passed it with enthusiasm, voted Pompey an army of 125,000 men and a navy of 500 vessels, and ordered the Treasury to place 144,000,000 sesterces at his disposal. In effect the bill deposed the Senate, ended the Sullan restoration, and established a provisional monarchy as a prelude and lesson to Caesar. The outcome strengthened the precedent. The very day after Pompey’s appointment the price of wheat began to fall. Within three months he accomplished his task-captured the pirate ships, took their strongholds, executed their leaders—and yet without abusing his unusual authority. Commerce took heart and sailed again, and a river of cereals flowed into Rome.

  While Pompey was still in Cilicia, his friend Manilius offered the Assembly a bill transferring to him full command of the armies and provinces then (66) under Lucullus, and prolonging the powers conferred upon him by the Gabinian Law. The Senate resisted, but the merchants and moneylenders gave strong support to the proposal. Pompey, they hoped, would be less lenient than Lucullus to their Asiatic debtors; he would restore the tax collections to the publicans; he would conquer not only Bithynia and Pontus, but Cappadocia, Syria, and Judea; and these rich fields would be thrown open to Roman trade and finance under the protection of Roman arms. A “new man,” Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had been elected praetor for that year with the aid of the business class, spoke “For the Manilian Law,” and attacked the Senatorial oligarchy with a rash eloquence unheard in Rome since the Gracchi, and with a candor shocking in a politician:

  The whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic provinces. If these revenues are destroyed, our system of credit will crash. ... If some lose their entire fortunes they will drag many more down with them. Save the state from such a calamity. . . . Prosecute with all your energies the war against Mithridates, by which the glory of the Roman name, the safety of our allies, our most valuable revenues, and the fortunes of innumerable citizens will be effectively preserved.35

  The measure was readily passed by the Assembly. The plebs cared little for the fortunes of the financiers; but it rejoiced in having found, through the issuance of extraordinary powers to a general, a means of annulling the Sullan legislation and deposing its ancient enemy, the Senate. From that moment the days of the Republic were numbered. The Roman revolution, helped by the oratory of its greatest foe, had taken another step toward Caesar.

  VII. CICERO AND CATILINE

  Plutarch thought that Marcus Tullius was called Cicero because of a wart, shaped like a vetch (cicer), on an ancestor’s nose; more probably his forebears had earned the cognomen by raising renowned crops of chick-peas. In his Laws Cicero describes with engaging tenderness the modest villa that had seen his birth near Arpinum, halfway between Rome and Naples, in the foothills of the Apennines. His father was just rich enough to give his son the best education that the age could provide. He engaged the Greek poet Archias to tutor Marcus in literature and Greek and then sent the youth to study law with Q. Mucius Scaevola, the greatest jurist of his time. Cicero listened eagerly to the trials and debates in the Forum, and rapidly learned the arts and tricks of forensic speech. “To succeed in the law,” he said, “a man must renounce all pleasures, avoid all amusements, say farewell to recreation, games, entertainment, almost to intercourse with his friends.”36

  Soon he was practicing law himself and making speeches whose brilliance and courage won him the gratitude of the middle classes and the plebs. He prosecuted a favorite of Sulla and denounced the proscriptions in the midst of the Sullan terror (80 B.C..).37 Shortly afterward, perhaps to avoid the dictator’s revenge, he went to Greece, and continued there his studies of oratory and philosophy. After three happy years in Athens he passed over to Rhodes, where he heard the lectures of Apollonius, son of Molon, on rhetoric, and those of Poseidonius on philosophy. From the first he learned the periodic sentence structure and purity of speech that were to distinguish his style; and from the other that mild Stoicism which he would later expound in his essays on religion, government, friendship, and old age.

  Returning to Rome at the age of thirty, he married Terentia, whose ample dowry now enabled him to go into politics. In 75 he distinguished himself by his just administration of a quaestorship in Sicily. In 70, having resumed the practice of law, he raised a furor among the aristocracy by accepting a retainer from the cities of Sicily and bringing suit against the senator Caius Verres, on the charge that as propraetor there (73-71) Verres had sold his appointments and decisions, had lowered individual tax assessments in inverse proportion to bribes received, had despoiled Syracuse of nearly all its statuary, had assigned the revenues of a whole city to his mistress, and all in all had carried injustice, extortion, and robbery to such a pitch as to leave the island more desolate than after two Servile Wars. Worse yet, Verres had kept for himself some of the spoils that usually went to the publicans. The business class supported Cicero in the indictment, while Hortensius, aristocratic leader of the Roman bar, led the defense for Verres. Cicero was allowed some hundred days to gather evidence in Sicily; he took only fifty, but he presented so much damaging testimony in his opening address that Hortensius—who had decorated his gardens with part of Verres’ sculptural loot—abandoned his client. Condemned to pay a fine of 40,000,000 sesterces, Verres fled into exile. Cicero published the five additional
speeches that he had prepared; they constituted an unsparing attack upon Roman malfeasance in the provinces. His energy and courage won him such support that when he ran for the consulate for 63 B.C. he was elected by acclamation.

  Born of modest equestrian rank, Cicero had naturally sided with the middle class and had resented the pride, privileges, and misrule of the aristocracy. But far more deeply he feared those radical leaders whose program, he thought, threatened all property with mob rule. He therefore made it his policy, now that he was in office, to promote a “concord of the orders”—i.e., a co-operation of the aristocracy and the business class—against the returning tide of revolt.

  The causes and forces of discontent, however, were too deep and varied to be easily dissolved. Many of the poor were listening to preachers of utopia, and some who listened were ripe for violence. A little above them were plebeians who had forfeited their property through defaulted mortgages. Some of Sulla’s veterans had failed to make their land allotments pay and were ready for any disturbance that might give them loot without toil. Among the upper classes were insolvent debtors and ruined speculators who had lost all hope or wish to meet their obligations. Others had political ambitions and saw their road to advancement cluttered with conservatives who took too long to die. A few revolutionists were sincere idealists, convinced that only a complete overturn could mitigate the corruption and inequity of the Roman state.

  One man sought to unite these scattered groups into a coherent political force. We know Lucius Sergius Catiline only through his enemies—through the history of his movement by the millionaire Sallust, and through the violent vituperation of Cicero’s orations Against Catiline. Sallust describes him as a “guilt-stained soul at odds with gods and men, who found no rest either waking or sleeping, so cruelly did conscience ravage his overwrought mind. Hence his pallid complexion, his bloodshot eyes, his gait now fast now slow; in short, his face and every glance showed the madman.”38 Such a description suggests the pictures that a people struggling for life or power paints of its enemies in war; when the battle is over the pictures are gradually revised, but in the case of Catiline we have no revision. In youth he had been charged with deflowering a Vestal Virgin, a half sister of Cicero’s first wife; the court had acquitted the Virgin, but gossip had not acquitted Catiline; on the contrary, it added that he had killed his son to please his jealous mistress.39 In the scale against these stories we can only say that for four years after Catiline’s death the common people of Rome—“the miserable, starveling rabble,” Cicero called them—strewed flowers upon his tomb.40 Sallust quotes what purports to be one of his speeches: