The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  He waited a very long time, for Hasdrubal had problems of his own. The Romans, swift to take advantage of Hannibal’s absence, had within months of his departure invaded Spain, with a force of two legions and some 15,000 allied troops under a young general named Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who was soon joined by his brother Publius. The immediate consequence of this invasion was a long struggle between Roman and Carthaginian forces, with the local Iberians fighting on both sides; the eventual result was a Roman presence in the peninsula which lasted over six centuries. After the death of the two Scipios in 211 BC they were replaced by a kinsman, also called Publius, who took Cartagena after a short siege. With the capture of their capital the Carthaginians swiftly lost heart, and by 206 BC the last of them had left the peninsula.

  While there had been a hope of victory over the Romans in Spain, Hasdrubal had had no chance of organising a relief expedition to help his brother. Not until 206 BC, when he knew he was beaten, could he begin to consider such an enterprise, and when in 205 he in turn led his men across southern France and across the Alps, he was marching to disaster: on the Metaurus river, just outside Ancona, he encountered a Roman army and his force was cut to pieces. Hannibal learned the news only when his brother’s severed head was delivered to his Capuan camp. He remained in Italy for another four years, but he would have been wiser to return; elsewhere in the Mediterranean, young Publius Cornelius Scipio had by now taken the offensive.

  In 204 BC Publius and his army landed on the North African coast at Utica, less than twenty miles west of Carthage, where they routed 20,000 local troops and established a position on the Bay of Tunis threatening the city itself. In the spring of 203 Hannibal, now seriously alarmed, hurried back to Carthage and in the following year led an army of 37,000 men and eighty elephants against the Roman invaders. The two sides eventually met near the village of Zama where, after a long and hard-fought battle, Hannibal suffered the only major defeat of his extraordinary career. It was at Zama, we are told, that the Romans finally discovered how to deal with the Carthaginians’ favourite tactical weapon, their elephants. First a sudden blast of trumpets would terrify them, to the point where their riders lost control; the Romans would then open their ranks, and the panic-stricken animals would charge between them, out of what they thought to be harm’s way. The Roman victory was complete. The Second Punic War was over. Rome’s prize for her victory was Spain. All the carefully built-up Carthaginian military and civil administration had already been dismantled–the Scipios had seen to that–and now it remained only for Carthage formally to cede the peninsula to her conquerors. Hannibal himself–who had narrowly escaped death at Zama–lived on until 183 BC, when he took poison to avoid being captured by the enemy he so hated. As for the victorious Scipio, he was rewarded with the title of ‘Africanus’, which he richly deserved. He, more than any other of his compatriots, had ensured that it was Rome, not Carthage, which would be mistress of the Mediterranean in the centuries that followed.

  But the Punic Wars had had a traumatic effect. They had brought the Roman Republic several times to the brink of disaster and had in all claimed the lives of perhaps two or three hundred thousand of her men. And yet there, across the narrow sea, the city of Carthage still stood–its population of some 750,000 unharmed, industrious and enterprising, recovering from its recent defeat with almost frightening speed: to every patriotic Roman a reminder, a reproach and a continuing threat. Clearly, its survival could not be tolerated. ‘Delenda est Carthago’ (‘Carthage is to be deleted’): these words were spoken by the elder Cato at the end of every speech he made in the Senate until they eventually became a watchword; the only question was how the job was to be done. At last, in 151 BC, an excuse was found when the Carthaginians presumed to defend their city from the depredations of a local chieftain. Rome treated this very natural reaction as a casus belli, and in 149 BC once again sent out an invading army. This time the Carthaginians surrendered unconditionally–until they heard the Roman peace terms, which were that their city should be utterly destroyed and that its inhabitants should not be permitted to rebuild their homes anywhere within ten miles of the sea. Appalled, they decided after all to resist. The result was a terrible two-year siege, after which, in 146 BC, the threatened destruction took place, not one stone being left on another. Cato was obeyed: Carthage was deleted.

  The Kingdom of Pontus–a hitherto somewhat insignificant state lying along the southern shore of the Black Sea–should have no place in a history of the Mediterranean. Nor would it have had but for its young king Mithridates VI, who for twenty-five years was the principal thorn in the flesh of the Roman Republic. Although by race he and his subjects were Persian, he always liked to think of himself as a Greek, a proud champion of Hellenism who would inspire all the Greek cities to rise up against their Latin oppressors. In 88 BC he invaded the Roman province of Asia17 and engineered a mass uprising which ended in a massacre of some 80,000 Italian residents; then, emboldened by this success, he crossed the Aegean and occupied Athens. Several other Greek cities fell to him in their turn.

  Clearly, Rome had to act; and the Roman Senate chose as supreme commander of its expeditionary force a fifty-year-old patrician by the name of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, possessed of a fine military record and a first-hand knowledge of Asia. Just as he was about to embark, however, the democratic faction in the Senate successfully moved that he be replaced by an old and somewhat decayed general under whom he had once served, Gaius Marius. It was a disastrous decision, and Sulla categorically refused to accept it. With his army behind him to a man, he marched on Rome, liquidated his enemies and, without more ado, set off for Greece. He stormed Athens, destroyed its port of Piraeus, won two decisive victories in the field and eventually concluded a peace treaty with Mithridates–though on what to many seemed surprisingly easy terms. All this, however, he had achieved without any semblance of authority from the government in Rome–where, in his absence, the Marian party had returned to power.

  Hastening back to the capital, Sulla routed them for the second time and assumed the role of dictator, unhesitatingly ordering the mass murder of nearly 10,000 of his political enemies, including forty senators and some 1,600 equites, or knights. He then passed a series of highly reactionary laws which had the effect of putting back the clock by at least half a century. Finally, with this work successfully completed, he abdicated and returned to his home in Campania. Here he led an extremely dissolute life, terrorising his many slaves. From time to time–pour encourager les autres, perhaps–he would sentence one or two of them to death, usually taking care to be present when the sentence was carried out; but one day in 78 BC, while he was watching a strangulation, the excitement became too much for him. He suffered a sudden seizure and died soon afterwards.

  The next forty years were dominated by the three military men who, even more than Sulla before them, were to put their indelible mark on republican Rome. They were Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to us as Pompey), Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius Julius Caesar. Pompey had won victories for Sulla–to whose stepdaughter he was married–in Sicily and North Africa, for which services he had been grudgingly granted the rare privilege of a Triumph.18 Unlike most noble Romans of his day he had little interest in money, and politics bored him stiff. What he liked was power. He was a soldier through and through, and a highly ambitious one.

  Crassus, the second of the three giants, could hardly have been more different. Born rich, he had made himself still richer by clever if unscrupulous wheeling and dealing in the Roman property market. He too was a first-rate general when he wanted to be, but while Pompey was forever seeking means to enhance his already formidable military reputation Crassus preferred to stay in Rome, intriguing behind the scenes for his own political and financial ends. His one major military achievement was in putting down a slave revolt which broke out in 73 BC. Having first pursued its leader, Spartacus, through Calabria, he finally caught up with him in Apulia, where he executed him on the spot. Six
thousand rebel slaves were subsequently crucified, their crosses lining the Appian Way.

  Pompey, who had been absent in Spain–where he founded the city of Pamplona and named it after himself–returned just in time for the crucifixions, in which he participated with enthusiasm; characteristically, he then attempted to take the credit for the entire operation. As can be readily understood, Crassus was furious. Each had an army behind him, and for a moment it looked as if the Republic was once again to be plunged into civil war; fortunately the rivals came to a last-minute understanding: the two would present themselves for election to the consulship in the year 70 BC. Strictly speaking, neither of them was eligible, neither having disbanded his army as consular candidates were required to do. Pompey, moreover–who was still only thirty-six–had not even taken his seat as a senator. But the Senate had not the courage to stand up against two such men, and they were duly elected. They spent their year of office meticulously undoing all Sulla’s legislation.

  In the years that followed, while Crassus remained busy in Rome–occupied with an interminable quarrel with the Senate over tax collections in Asia–Pompey went from strength to strength. In 67 BC, with 120,000 men and 500 ships and in only sixty days, he virtually eliminated the pirates who had long plagued the Mediterranean, thus making the seas safe for the best part of a thousand years. He was then despatched to the east, where the King of Pontus was up to his old tricks. Unfortunately for Pompey, Mithridates committed suicide before battle could be joined, but there was plenty of other work to be done in eastern lands before he returned home. Without bothering to consult the Senate, he rapidly annexed Pontus; moving south to Syria, he expelled the last Seleucid king and made this too a province, thereby acquiring for Rome the great city of Antioch. Finally he pressed on to Judaea, where he captured Jerusalem–sensibly allowing the reigning king to remain on his throne as a ‘client’ of Rome. All this he accomplished in just four years, during which it is not too much to say that he changed the face of the Near East more radically than at any other time until the coming of Islam.

  When Pompey returned to Rome in 62 BC it was as a conquering hero. He was granted a second Triumph, far more splendid than the first. Many Romans trembled, remembering the return of Sulla just twenty years before, but the triumphator disbanded his troops, asking nothing but the ratification of all that he had done in the east and a grant of land on which his veteran soldiers could settle. Both requests seemed reasonable enough; with regard to the first, he had indeed acted without authority, but the slowness of communications in those days had left him no alternative. In any case Rome’s gains had been immense; the Romans had little cause to complain.

  Complain, however, they did. One of the principal critics of Pompey’s actions was Crassus, clearly motivated by personal jealousy of his old rival. The two most powerful men in Rome were now at loggerheads, both with the government and with each other.

  The third and greatest member of this astonishing triumvirate19 now appears on the scene. In 62 BC Gaius Julius Caesar was thirty-eight, and married to Sulla’s granddaughter Pompeia (he was to divorce her in the following year).20 His reputation in Rome was that of a cultivated intellectual and a formidable orator in the Senate, a provider of lavish entertainments who was consequently always in debt, and a sexual profligate, whose affairs–with both men and women–were legion but who had nevertheless been elected Pontifex Maximus, chief of the priesthood of the Roman state: talented, fascinating, but basically unreliable. In 60 BC he returned from Spain, where he had been serving as governor and where, after a few insignificant victories, he too had been promised a Triumph. But now there arose a difficulty. He was determined to gain the consulship; to announce his candidature, however, he would be obliged to appear in Rome long before the Triumph could be arranged, and by doing so he would forfeit his right to the ceremony. He tried to solve the problem by formally requesting that the announcement be made by proxy; when this was refused, he hesitated no longer. Plans for the Triumph were put aside. He came straight to Rome. Power was more important than glory.

  But now there came a further blow. It had long been the custom in Rome to allocate to its prospective consuls, even before they took office, the provinces which they would be sent to govern at the end of their term; the Senate, knowing that it could not hope to prevent Caesar’s election but determined at least to cut him down to size, allotted to him no provinces worthy of the name, but simply ‘the forests and cattle-runs of Italy’. This was certainly a deliberate snub; and Caesar certainly took it as such.

  The Senate had now succeeded in antagonising the three most powerful men in Rome, and since Caesar remained on excellent terms with Pompey and Crassus it was hardly surprising that he should have approached the two men with a proposal for a coalition. In return for their support he would give both what they wanted, so long as neither raised an objection and on condition that they refrained also from squabbling with each other. He was as good as his word. His fellow consul, a colourless figure laughably named Bibulus, withdrew to his house ‘to watch the sky for omens’; Caesar simply ignored him. He rewarded Pompey’s veterans with the land they wanted and ensured the ratification of his achievements in the east, and was delighted when Pompey–who had by now divorced his first wife–asked for the hand of his daughter Julia. Where Crassus was concerned, the little matter of the tax-gathering was also quickly settled. Meanwhile, with the help of his new allies, Caesar had personally allocated to himself two real provinces to govern when his consulate was over: Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and Illyricum (Dalmatia). As it happened, the news arrived at that moment of the sudden death of the governor of Transalpine Gaul, which covered most of modern France. Here was an opportunity indeed: he took that over as well.

  After his consulship Caesar left at once for Gaul, where he was to remain for the next eight years; by the time he returned to Rome he had conquered the entire country. Plutarch estimates that a million Gauls lost their lives, with another million enslaved; far more important to Caesar himself, he had built up a military reputation which put even Pompey in the shade, showing himself to be one of the supreme commanders of all time. His mind worked like lightning and could adapt instantly to a changing situation; his timing was faultless. Physically too, he possessed almost incredible energy and powers of endurance, often travelling a hundred miles in a light carriage in a single day, in spite of appalling weather and execrable roads.

  Back in Rome, although Pompey and Crassus were still in charge, their authority was rapidly weakening thanks to the intrigues and machinations of Publius Clodius Pulcher–he who had infiltrated the Bona Dea ceremony. Clodius had by now revealed himself as a dangerously radical demagogue, whose activities were becoming a serious threat to the state. Determined that their triumvirate should be preserved, the three met in 56 BC at Lucca, a city just inside Cisalpine Gaul–Caesar being aware that a number of irregularities during his consulship might well render him liable to prosecution if he set foot on Roman territory. There, by dividing the Roman world into three separate spheres of influence–east to Crassus, centre to Caesar, west to Pompey–they decided how best their several ambitions could be fulfilled. Pompey and Crassus would stand for the consulship for the second time in the following year; after that Crassus–who was beginning to feel overshadowed by the other two and was determined to prove himself in battle–would lead an expedition beyond the Euphrates against the Parthian Empire, now the only substantial nation confronting Rome anywhere in the world. Pompey would take over a five-year responsibility for Spain–governing it, however, for most of the time through subordinates so that he could remain in Rome as effective head of the administration. As for Caesar, he would have his Gallic command extended for another five years so that he could extend and consolidate his conquests.21

  But the partnership’s inevitable stresses and strains were beginning to tell. In 54 BC Julia died in childbirth; she had done much to hold her father and husband together, and with her death they
drifted apart. Then, in 53 BC, away in the east, the army of Crassus suffered an overwhelming defeat by Parthian mounted archers at Carrhae (the modern Harran, in southeast Turkey). Of the 6,000 Roman legionaries engaged, 5,500 were killed, and when Crassus went to negotiate peace terms he was killed too. Pompey and Caesar were left alone, each becoming more and more aware of the fact that Rome was not big enough for both of them, and when Pompey rejected Caesar’s suggestion of another marriage tie between their two families, taking instead as his third wife the daughter of Caesar’s enemy Metellus Scipio, whom he then made his fellow consul, it was clear that matters were coming to a head. Pompey, moreover, had the distinct advantage: he was in Rome.

  But Rome was fast declining into anarchy. Although Pompey enjoyed more authority than anyone else, he had almost as many enemies in high places as Caesar, and he was increasingly unable to control the rival gangs of Clodius and his principal adversary, Milo, who divided the streets between them. Then in 52 BC Clodius was murdered and Pompey was made sole consul, with special emergency powers to enable him to restore order in the city; two years later it was moved in the Senate that Caesar should be relieved of his command. The motion was blocked by an energetic young tribune named Curio, one of Caesar’s most ardent supporters, but the stalemate continued. Curio then proposed that both Caesar and Pompey should simultaneously resign their posts, and it was when this proposal too was rejected that one of the consuls then in office called on Pompey to take command of all the forces of the Republic–effectively assuming dictatorial powers. Pompey accepted–on condition, as he put it, that no better way could be found–and immediately took over two legions that happened to be in the capital.