The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  In the city, the summer of 54 was exceptionally hot and tension was exacerbated by continuing shortages of grain. The political setting is still a challenge to our imaginations. Rome was home to such vast numbers and the fascinating politics of the next four years include intricate bribery scandals (Ahenobarbus and his noble colleagues tried to nominate their successors in return for payment), localized bouts of violence (gangs erupted in the city, made up of soldiers, freed slaves, artisans, shopkeepers and trained gladiators) and, in 53 and 52, yet another crisis over the consulship. And yet there was no popular uprising for a change of constitution, no challenge to the total system. The main continuing question was the scope of Pompey's ambitions. After the consulship of 5 5 he had been allotted the provinces of Spain, a chance for glory, but since 54 he had preferred to wait with troops outside Rome's boundaries and govern Spain through subordinates. His most personal link with Caesar now ended: his wife Julia, Caesar's beloved daughter, died in childbirth. The people of Rome gave her a fine funeral, but what would Pompey now choose to do? He was, after all, becoming an old man. In 53 he lost one major competitor, then in 52 another. The first to go was the elderly Crassus, now in his late fifties, whose consulship had been followed by the granting of a command in the East against the hostile Parthians. At last, Crassus might return with the full glory of a military triumph, denied him after his actions against Spartacus in the late 70s: its absence had continued to needle the old man. In fact, he was too incompetent and was tricked into defeat by the Parthians in 53, costing him his life and most of his army.

  In Rome, January 52 then saw the spectacular end of the most effective of the populists, Clodius. He was attacked on the Appian Way by a gang loyal to his conservative rival Milo, and what began as an accident ended with Clodius' brutal murder. His corpse was brought into the city, where his wife's impassioned mourning helped to incite the popular mood. Two of the tribunes added a eulogy over the dead man in the Forum, whereupon the crowd carried his corpse right into the Senate house and tried to cremate their champion on a bonfire of smashed furniture and documents. The house itself caught fire and its ashes were watched by spectators until nightfall. Mean­while crowds rampaged in Rome and attacked anyone who was seen wearing jewels or fine clothes in the streets. There was no established police force and the one option seemed to be to call on Pompey to restore order with troops. Waiting outside the city, he had already used his power as an ex-consul inside the city in 53. Now he was voted a sole consulship, his third. It was a 'divine' one, according to an alarmed and thankful Cicero, and yet it was only two years since his last one. Caesar, by contrast, was still observing the proper ten-year interval between consulships and would not stand for election until summer 49, hoping to take up office in January 48. Meanwhile ambitious young men, new faces and those who simply relished a fight, were leaving Italy to seek promotions with Caesar in the West. Increasingly, he could reward them from his booty and so a real 'Caesarian clique' was building up outside Rome.

  The crucial long-term question was whether Caesar would be allowed to stand as a candidate for a consulship while absent: if he had to return to canvass for it and lay down his power as a commander, his opponents would prosecute him inside Rome's boundaries, probably before an intimidated and bribed court. In March 52 Caesar seemed to get what he wanted: the ten tribunes, supported by Pompey, carried a law which allowed him the unusual step of a candidacy in absence. Traditionalists in the Senate were bypassed by it, but many other questions remained open: how would Caesar and Pompey coexist? Was it expected that, like Pompey, Caesar could now stand for a consulship earlier than 49, in (say) 50? If he was elected consul again, whatever would he do this time?

  The answers were to mark a real rupture of the Roman Republic: why had such a crisis come? Abroad, the provinces were being ruled by individual governors with powers to do much as they wished and scope to extort huge gains from their subjects. These commands inflated their resources for competition back at Rome, but their victims, the provincials, did not bring about a crisis by rebelling against this type of rule. Nearer home, the previous bitter conflicts between senators and many of the knights and between Romans and Italians were also irrelevant: since the 70s the aftermath of the Social War and of Sulla's brief 'solution' for the jury-courts had largely settled down. In the 50s, however, Romans themselves would still think of 'luxury' as a major culprit. As consuls in 55, Pompey and Crassus, inordinately rich men, had considered introducing measures to curb it. In 51 the arch-traditionalist Cato amused the plebs by giving 'old-fashioned' games, in disapproval at recent ostentation: he offered simple wreaths, not gold, as prizes and gave small presents of food to the spectators.

  We have a sense, here, of men with a traditional obsession, like the 'gypsies' or 'single mothers' of modern political rhetoric, which is diverting them from the real structural weaknesses. For, despite the years of rhetoric, luxury had marvellously proliferated. Upper-class Romans were building magnificent villas as second homes along the coastline of the Bay of Naples, supporting them on piers of concrete and adorning them with the rows of pillars and terraces which we can enjoy in later paintings of them, preserved for us at Pompeii. These attacks on nature were the work of 'Xerxes in a toga', said moralists, recalling the canal-digging of this former Persian king. Since Pompey's conquests in Asia, fine gems had reached avid Roman buyers, prompting collections of their different types. In the kitchen, specialized local delicacies were increasingly sought and identified, whether huge snails from north Africa or home-grown dormice raised in special 'dormouse-houses' (gliraria): 'they are fattened in jars which many keep even inside the villa; acorns, walnuts or chestnuts are put inside and when a cover is put on the jars they become fat in the dark.' There were even flocks of peacocks, kept for display and consumption. In classical Athens, one prominent aristocrat displayed 'Persian' pea­cocks, a gift from the Persian king, and sold eggs to fascinated visitors: his son was then prosecuted for treating the birds as his own. At Rome, peacocks began to be bred by the hundred in the early first century bc and, before long, a flock was reckoned to yield a small fortune of an income: 'a flock of 100' would produce a tenth of the property qualification to be an upper-class knight.

  We must remember Cicero's comment: what Romans disliked was private luxury, whereas public display was munificence, and not dis­agreeable. It was, then, alarming to political rivals, but highly popular, when Pompey paid for a spectacular theatre in 55 bc, including a statue of himself and fourteen nations which he had conquered. Grander, even, than Scaurus' theatre three years earlier, it led up to at least four temples (including one to Victorious Venus). At its dedication, elephants and 500 lions were staged in a beastly 'hunt'. In 53 a future tribune, Curio, put up not one wooden theatre but two, built as a pair which could turn back to back, or revolve into one and become a single arena for gladiators. These luxurious displays were public, at least. What was attackable, by contrast, was the 'selfish' luxury of marble-pillared houses (the huge pillars of dark-red marble in Scaurus' hall were notorious) and when he took back the fantastic­ally rich decoration of his theatre to adorn his own Tuscan villa, the slaves at the property are said to have set fire to it in protest at his extravagance.4

  To us, urban poverty and suffering at Rome seem much more relevant problems. The scarcity of food and water, the appalling housing for Rome's masses were an intolerable negligence. Yet unlike the poor in many Greek cities in the age of Plato, Rome's poor did not unite and rebel for a new constitution. Poor people rioted, cer­tainly, for Clodius, but they were rioting for a great benefactor, now lost to them. In the process the Senate house burned down, but only by accident, and there was no programme to abolish the Senate itself.

  There was no popular campaigning with a new ideology. One reason was that so many of the 'plebs' were still freed persons, dependent on their former masters; others were foreigners; by contrast, a hard core of Roman 'city-folk', persisting across the generations, was always much scar
cer. The upper class spent lavishly in the city, and it was their spending which sustained the mass of shopkeepers and builders and even the specialists in the dreaded luxuries. Many of the plebs therefore needed the rich, and as none of them could stand up and speak in their assemblies or at political meetings, and few ever voted (and then in blocks), the 'popular' potential of the Roman constitution was wonderfully contained. At Athens, when democracy was adopted, the members of the Athenians' supreme 'senate' had been discredited by their collaboration with the previous tyranny; the exiling of other nobles by those tyrants had already taught lesser people that they could cope well enough without an aristocrat to help them along. At Rome, no such crisis had discredited the senators. Above all, in Attica the citizenry had been so much smaller; it was linked by supposed 'kinship', and was much more cohesive than the Roman citizenry now up and down Italy.

  In the Italian countryside, the plight of the poor was certainly no better than in Rome, yet here too there were no 'peasants' revolts' in the 50s. Rather, more and more of the poor were being recruited, or forced, into the army for a long service abroad. Soldiers' wages, though meagre, did at least exist: the problem was that, once in the army, soldiers looked to their generals, not to any 'republican' values. What had 'the Republic' ever done for them anyway? Here, indeed, was a cause of crisis. It was not that Rome needed monarchy or 'stable government' in the late 50s because the scale of her empire had grown so big. Instead, tensions arose from the very conquests by which much of this empire was still being won. Generals rewarded their soldiers with spoils from their victories abroad and then won credit by pro­posals to settle them on plots of land and reward them on their return to Italy. The same generals fought on with the prolonged commands which were now being obtained by ignoring the Senate and going directly to the popular assemblies for an enabling law. A friendly tribune would then veto the proposals to recall an important general in subsequent years. The old two-headed monster, as the Roman constitution had evolved, found the limbs (the people) being used to cow what had once represented itself as the nourishing, sensible stomach (the Senate). If Polybius had lived to see it, he would have considered it proof of his theory: 'oligarchy', as morals changed, would decline into 'democracy' and then into 'monarchy'. But the 'democracy' was really no such thing.

  The more the generals conquered, the more their riches grew, enabling them to pay more to their troops from their own gains. They could also pay back the massive loans through which they had bought their way to a command in the first place. In reply, senators should have increased the soldiers' pay from state funds and somehow paid publicly for their land-settlements. But even then, the sums needed would have been huge, and would have required much more than a new inheritance tax which, understandably, the rich detested.

  The 'liberty' of legislation by the 'people' (few of whom actually voted) was thus manipulated to curb the 'liberty' of senators to do, and eventually say, whatever they wanted. But personal dignity, rank and esteem also exacerbated the problem. Once Pompey had set such a dazzling new standard after his conquests in Asia, his rivals could not regard themselves as his equal or superior unless they shone even more brightly. The values of their ancestors and the entire training of their careers encouraged them to compete with Pompey's new lustre. In Caesar's case, this 'dignity' was driving him to bring about the deaths of a million people in his Gallic provinces and to amass an increasingly incredible fortune. When Caesar returned to Rome he would not only be a consul. He would be able to triumph with the most astounding displays of gold, silver and booty. His debts would no longer be a problem. After plundering Gaul on an enormous scale he himself would be able to bribe and lend to people of influence at Rome, and eventually he would 'benefit' the entire city plebs. Although the plebs would never dismantle the republican system by themselves, they had acute discontents, and the man who gave all of them benefits would be almost unopposable. Meanwhile Caesar's soldiers were becoming hardened experts in warfare thanks to their years of practice at the Gauls' expense. He himself could pay them, and he would duly provide for them. If he won the consulship again, what might he not do for the urban plebs and for his troops, now his men of ten years' standing? Would he ever lay the office down? Opposition to one-man rule was the very lifeblood of republican values, and senators had certainly not become indifferent to it.

  Despite the moralists' complaints, the gangs in the streets of Rome, the bribery and the fears of civil war did not signify an age of decadence. In the heart of Rome, the competition for glory was visible in the leaders' expensive public buildings. An entire new Forum was being paid for by Caesar at vast cost, rivalling the huge stone theatre which had already been paid for by Pompey. The city's architects were breaking new ground thanks to these new challenges. Above all, the years of tension were to be critical years for Latin thought and litera­ture. Scholarship, philosophy and even the study of religious traditions blossomed under the spectre of the political crises. So did practical law. More interestingly, the superb poems of Catullus ranged from love-poetry to mythical narrative and personal invective, transcending their fine Greek models. At greater length, Lucretius' fine poem On the Nature of Things expressed an Epicurean philosophy of the world and society and the irrelevance to them both of the traditional gods. This masterpiece was probably composed when the crisis had just broken into open Civil War, between 49 and 48.5 By the 50s most of the major participants in Roman political life had studied Greek thought themselves. Even Crassus had a taste for Greek philosophy, as did Marcus Brutus, a man who had named features in his garden after features of ancient Sparta. There was also a sharpened interest in history. Works on chronology tried to interrelate Roman and Greek events and from the mid-jos onwards examples from Greek history became more prominent in Cicero's writings. Teachers (to his disgust) were even encouraging their pupils in oratory to study the historian Thucydides' horribly difficult Greek speeches.'1 When Civil War broke out, the examples of famous Greeks from the past would become even more immediate to those who became swept up in it.

  Above all, there was a frankness of speech, a sharpness of wit and a magnificent scope for oratory. The wit and frankness still live for us in Cicero's letters, in sayings of Caesar or his rivals and even in letters from Cicero's lesser but educated friend, young Caelius, who favoured Caesar but wrote so vividly to Cicero on affairs at Rome in the late 50s. Here, we best catch what the 'liberty' of speech and thought really meant to such people. It is no coincidence that this age of great court-scenes, great addresses to the Senate and to popular meetings is also the supreme age of Roman oratory.

  Not that the glitter was all male, either. Young Caelius was a fine dancer, but so was the remarkable lady Sempronia, whom even her critics admired for her wit, her wide reading and her personal culture.7 No wife of a classical Athenian could have compared with such a character. She was only one of several remarkable women who are known to us in the late Republic: Clodia, the desirable sister of Clodius, was probably the inspiration for Catullus' best love-poems, while Fulvia, Sempronia's daughter, was to be the wife of three great husbands, including Clodius and then Mark Antony. Fulvia was the woman whose laments for the dead Clodius had fired a Roman crowd in the Forum. The austere ideals of the wool-working 'traditional' housewife were not to the liking of such bold spirits. They had lovers, they joked, they even advised. In autumn 52. bc, as the crisis loomed, one of the consuls was honoured with a party in which his house was turned into a brothel and two high-society ladies (one of them supposedly Fulvia, the other a former wife of Pompey) were said to have serviced the guests.8

  For centuries, the Roman Republic had bent, regrouped and sur­vived new tensions. It had outlived the proud Scipio, Marius even, and the ruthless conservative Sulla. The latest tensions went deep, but could it not survive both Caesar and Pompey too? Huge risks and a swathe of wonderfully unpredictable decisions would have to be taken before Caesar could ever dominate. Even then, the Republic was not dead, although Caesa
r's example was essential to its subsequent extinction by his successors. Out in Gaul, while the guests in Rome enjoyed their brothel-party, Caesar was beset with difficulties. His previous Gallic conquests had turned out to be not so secure after all; he still had to pacify them and he had to establish when his provincial command would end. Was it to end in 50 or 49, and if so, precisely when in the year? Could he run on, with the help of friendly tribunes' vetoes, until he was elected consul in absence? Back in Rome, with Clodius gone, even Cicero had begun to hope that he, perhaps, might have a second consulship too. And after the crisis of Clodius' death, the elections did work again: there were consuls, noble ones, for 51 and then for 50, and for once, we hear nothing about bribery.

  Through the fragmented mirror of Cicero's letters, we can follow the fascinating steps towards confrontation. In 52 Pompey was still 'friendly' to Caesar and Caesar was still said to have retained Pompey as heir to his will. By June 51 the question of a successor to Caesar in Gaul was to be raised explicitly in the Senate; on 29 September, however, it was decreed that discussions of the matter would not begin until 1 March 50. Remarks made by Pompey begin to make clear that he had a problem now with Caesar. The biggest problem, then and now, was when exactly Caesar's command would expire.