Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Sulla had himself appointed dictator rei publicae constituendae – ‘dictator for the reform of the state’ – in 82–81 BC. To ensure his reforms took effect, he then retained power as consul through 80 BC, before retiring from public life the following year. His power in this period – what Cary called ‘the temporary monarchy of Cornelius Sulla’ – was absolute, rested on military force, and was used to destroy completely the popular party and shore up the authority of the Senate. The veto powers of the tribunes and the law-making powers of the popular assemblies were drastically curtailed. The state-subsidized grain supply was abolished. Marian senators were purged and either fled or were killed. Three hundred new senators were drafted in to create an enlarged and conservative-dominated assembly.

  A formal career structure – the cursus honorum (‘course of honours’) – was created for senators. First one sought election to one of 20 quaestor-ships at the minimum age of 30, success in this guaranteeing a seat in the Senate, a measure which helped maintain the number of senators at around 600. This was followed by the praetorship, with eight posts available, and a minimum age of 39; Sulla’s increase in the number of posts from six to eight enlarged the pool of men qualified to govern provinces in an expanding Empire. Finally, for the fortunate few, there was election to one of the two consulships, for which the minimum age was 42. Sulla’s purge, enlargement and reordering of the senatorial order were the prerequisites for the dominant role its members were expected to play in the new political order. As well as commanding armies, governing provinces, and directing government departments, senators alone – not equestrians – were to sit as judges in a series of new specialist tribunals that Sulla set up to deal with different types of crime.

  Five times now – in 132, 122, 100, 88 and 82 BC – the popular party had been crushed in a reactionary coup. But the last had been by far the worst, and it must have seemed to the traumatized survivors a decisive blow. But the violence, avarice and naked illegality of Sulla’s regime – a response to the depth of the crisis in Roman society – provoked a reaction. When the dictator retired and the terror ended, when ‘normal’ politics resumed, men found themselves outraged by what had happened and few, even among the most conservative, wished to be known as supporters of Sulla. Many had benefited and were glad to have done so, but, opportunists and trimmers, they found little advantage in any lingering association with the bloody tyrant of counter-revolution. When the politically ambitious looked about them, moreover, they found those great streams of popular discontent that had once carried Marius to glory still flowing strongly. Decayed noble families, equestrian entrepreneurs, upwardly mobile Italian gentry, debt-ridden small farmers, the mob of the city slums: Roman society was still a cauldron of discontents. Above all there were the soldiers – senator-generals, equestrian-officers, and the common citizens who formed the rank and file: tens of thousands of highly trained, tightly disciplined, heavily armed men. The army, Rome’s instrument of imperial conquest, had always been the very essence of the state. Never more so than now. The crisis of the Late Republic had militarized politics. Armies had become arbiters between reaction and reform. Blood and iron determined history’s course. This was the new reality. It would soon be apparent that at such a time the restored rule of the Senate had no secure foundation.

  The rising sun: the supremacy of Pompey, 77–60 BC

  ‘More worship the rising than the setting sun’: so the young general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great – is supposed to have said when comparing his own career with that of his former patron in the late 80s BC. It was the rival ambitions of the men who had formed Sulla’s victorious civil-war faction that undid the counter-revolution of 82–81 BC. Sulla’s response was world-weary – ‘I see, then, it is my destiny to contend with children in my old age’ – and the young Pompey was granted his desire: a triumphal procession through the streets of Rome.

  ‘In his youth,’ explained Plutarch, ‘his countenance pleaded for him, seeming to anticipate his eloquence, and win upon the affections of the people before he spoke. His beauty even in his bloom of youth had something in it at once of gentleness and dignity; and when his prime of manhood came, the majesty and kingliness of his character at once became visible in it.’(11) By Plutarch’s time, the later 1st century AD, Pompey had become a legendary golden boy, but even contemporaries had compared him – in appearance and achievement – to Alexander himself. After victory over Marian diehards in Africa in 81 BC, his soldiers had hailed him, just 26 years old and not yet a senator, Imperator (Conqueror) and Magnus (the Great). Pompey welcomed the acclaim, indeed revelled in it. Coming at such an early age it deepened the outlines of his emergent character: though dynamic and brilliant, Pompey was essentially shallow and self-serving, a man driven to great achievement not by high purpose but by vanity. One of Sulla’s brood, once launched in life he quickly broke with a patron whose carefully crafted constitution was designed precisely to smother such politically precocious men as himself. Already famous as one of Rome’s most successful generals, Pompey, under Sulla’s system, would have had to wait four years for a seat in the Senate, 13 for the governorship of a province, and 16 for the consulship. Pompey, to advance himself, broke with the Senate and appealed to the People.

  But men make history in the circumstances given to them. The ambition of its members may have broken up Sulla’s faction, but Pompey’s challenge to the authority of the Senate was possible only because the People offered an alternative way to power. The proscriptions had crushed the popular regime of Cinna and Carbo, but they had not settled the myriad discontents to which that regime had given distorted expression. Reforming magistrates, militant demonstrations, the packing of popular assemblies: these methods of change had been defeated by force of arms. But the chaotic swirl of interests that powered the Roman Revolution soon found another channel: in the ambition of a young politician-general – an opportunist willing to sell his aristocratic soul for popular favour.

  It was a new military crisis – or rather a series of crises rooted in the empire’s exponential expansion – that gave ‘the rising sun’ its chance to ascend. Huge and growing inflows of plundered wealth from the Empire had inflated the cost of competition for high office. Generals and their soldiers were enriched by war booty and slave hauls. The state coffers were filled by indemnities and tribute payments. Businessmen grew rich on tax-farming and money-lending, senators and their staffs on the bribes and perks of colonial service. Land was seized and parcelled up to make ranches for the rich and farms for veterans. The art market was flooded with Greek masterpieces. The beautiful coastline of the Bay of Naples – the ancient Roman riviera – was soon ringed with luxury villas. Pompeii became a boom town. Its art and architecture reveal much about the Italian elite in the age of Pompey and Caesar. What had once been a town of small houses and workshops became a city of grand residences and luxuria.

  The owners of the House of the Vestals – recently excavated by a Bradford University team – absorbed two houses to the north of their own property and carried out wholesale remodelling of the resultant complex, creating an elaborate series of reception rooms around two peristyles (colonnaded courtyards). Such houses were decorated with an abundance of mosaics, frescos and statues. This was the age of Pompeii’s ‘Second Style’ wall-painting. Fresco artists covered entire walls with highly elaborate trompe-l’oeil schemes, where depictions of architectural structures in three dimensions, often with gardens beyond, gave an impression of surpassing grandeur and wealth – in contrast to the austere simplicity of the earlier ‘First Style’. Luxuria was the conspicuous and extravagant consumption of wealth as a signifier of rank, status and influence – of the ability to pull strings and do favours. Luxuria was about building a political base: recruiting the retinue of clients whose role as voters, canvassers, and, if it came to it, heavies for a street fight, was essential to political success. Hosting dinners in fashionably redecorated peristyles was, for the elite of Pompeii, a stra
tegy for pursuing public acclaim and the honour of elective office. So too was the private patronage by which the public face of the town was transformed. ‘Gaius Quintus Valgus, son of Gaius, and Marcus Porcius, son of Marcus, in their capacity as quinqennial duoviri [dual mayors in a census year], to demonstate the honour of the colony, erected this place of spectacles at their own expense and donated it to the colonists for their perpetual use’(12): thus do two of the leading citizens of Pompeii announce their generosity in paying for the construction of the amphitheatre on a stone plaque in c. 80–70 BC. ‘Twenty pairs of gladiators of Gnaeus Alleius Nigidius Maius, quinquennial, and their substitutes will fight without any public expense at Pompeii’(13): here another Pompeian politician advertises the free games he is paying for on a painted wall-poster. Dozens of similar inscriptions reveal a whole town built and serviced by private patronage. In this, the local gentry of Pompeii mimicked the imperial statesmen of Rome – who played, of course, for far higher, and equally inflationary, stakes.

  Conquerors returning to Rome would celebrate with triumphal processions, free games and banquets, and the building of public monuments and private palaces. Pompey’s spectacles, benefactions and luxuria would eventually surpass that of all his predecessors, but his in turn would be surpassed by those of Caesar, Octavian-Augustus, and the Julio-Claudian emperors. Pompey’s triumph after his return from the East in 62 BC, Plutarch tells us, lasted two days, the pageant representing the subjugation of 15 nations, the capture of 1,000 fortresses, 900 towns and 800 pirate ships, and the foundation of 39 new cities. The booty was commensurate, much of it displayed in the procession, while placards raised overhead recorded ‘an account of all the tributes throughout the empire, and how that before these conquests the revenue amounted but to 50 million denarii, whereas from his acquisitions they had a revenue of 85 million, and that in present payment he was bringing into the common treasury coins, gold and silver plate, and ornaments to the value of 20,000 talents, over and above what had been distributed among the soldiers, among whom the smallest share was 1,500 drachmas.’(14)

  It was from such hauls that Roman politicians built power-bases. One among many of Pompey’s benefactions was Rome’s first large stone-built theatre. A later marble map of Rome and the evidence of archaeology show it to have been a massive barrel-vaulted structure able to seat around 27,000; associated with it was a large garden with surrounding portico. Less permanent but no less politically potent were handouts, banquets and shows. ‘Pompey spent some time in Rome before the opening or dedication of his theatre,’ explains Plutarch, ‘where he treated the people with all sorts of games, shows and exercises, in gymnastics alike and in music. There was likewise the hunting or baiting of wild beasts, and combats with them, in which 500 lions were slain; but above all, the battle of elephants was a spectacle full of horror and amazement. These entertainments brought him great honour and popularity; but on the other side he created no less envy to himself.’(15)

  The inflationary cost of competitive ‘political accumulation’ – the building and maintaining of rival power-bases in domestic politics – meant aggressive wars of plunder, and super-exploitation of conquered territory. Military action was used, in effect, to redistribute large quantities of surplus wealth from native ruling classes on the rim of the imperial system to the Roman ruling class at its centre. Different sorts of evidence allow occasional glimpses of the impact on the subjugated. We have seen that Sulla’s eastern war of 87–84 BC yielded – among much else no doubt – 120 million denarii from the indemnity payments imposed on the Greek cities of Asia. This, however, proved far more lucrative than it first seems, for the ransacked cities – they had already been comprehensively plundered by Sulla’s troops – were forced to borrow to pay, and within a decade their compound-interest debt to Roman money-lenders had reached a staggering 720 million denarii. Pompey’s eastern war in 66–63 BC appears to have cost its victims much more. If Plutarch can be trusted (mistakes in recording numbers are easily made, not least in the copying of manuscripts), then we seem to have the equivalent of £3 billion ($5.9 billion) in booty for the treasury, perhaps £2 billion ($3.9 billion) in booty for the soldiers, and almost a £1 billion ($1.9 billion) extra each year in tribute (see Note on ancient monetary values).

  But that, it seems, was not the whole story. While Pompey used much of his own share to further his political career in Rome, he also invested some to ensure a steady income for the future. Cicero discovered something of this during his governorship of Cilicia in 51–50 BC. Pompey had lent money to the King of Cappadocia at a very high rate of interest, and he was subsequently being paid 198,000 denarii a month – though even this was not enough to cover interest, let alone pay off capital. The cost was passed on to local taxpayers: the peasants of Cappadocia. Our knowledge of this is an accident: it is mentioned in a surviving letter of Cicero to his friend Atticus. We have no way of knowing the extent of such practice. However, the debasement of the Egyptian silver coinage, the bullion content of which roughly halved between the 60s and the 40s BC, may well be circumstantial evidence for the overall level of Roman exploitation in the East. King Ptolemy XII Auletes is known to have borrowed and bribed on a massive scale to secure Roman military support for his restoration to the Egyptian throne after a coup in 58 BC. It is very tempting to agree with Michael Crawford, numismatist and ancient historian, and link the debasement with the corruption.

  It is a common misconception that Rome brought peace and order to the world. The misconception is rooted in Roman myth. According to Virgil, it was only ‘the proud’ who were ground down by war, while ‘the submissive’ were spared to enjoy the benefits of peace, order and good government. It was the barbarian ‘other’ that threatened violence, not the imperial superpower. In truth, the predatory aggression of Late Republican Rome plunged the world into violence and chaos. It provoked an explosion of resistance across the Mediterranean in the 70s BC, resistance facilitated by Rome’s victories over the Hellenistic states of the East. Once-powerful empires had been fragmented by defeat into a myriad of imperial provinces, client kingdoms, and carefully contained ‘rogue states’. Rome did not yet constitute an effective suzerain. Its interventions took the form of smash and grab. The pieces left behind, the broken states of a disintegrating geopolitical system, could not always hold in check the furies of discontent and disorder aroused. This provided Pompey’s opportunity. Vain, ambitious and self-serving, he now stepped forth as saviour of Rome and seeming architect of a new Pax Romana for the Mediterranean world.

  The conflict raged across Spain, Asia Minor, the Mediterranean Sea, and Italy itself. In 80 BC, after Sulla’s victory in the civil war, the Marian leader Quintus Sertorius had fled to Spain (where he had served as a provincial governor) to continue the struggle against the new regime. With a small retinue of Roman officers, he raised the Spanish tribes and sustained a guerrilla insurgency across the peninsula for eight years. Roman commanders found themselves in the coils of a people’s war, facing hostility in every village, and the risk of ambush by numerous but elusive guerrillas whenever their cumbersome columns crossed country. At about the same time, fleets of pirate ships achieved naval dominance in the Mediterranean. Many men displaced by the political and military upheavals of the 80s BC found service on fast light warships that could be used to overhaul merchant vessels, raid coastal towns, and kidnap high-ranking Romans for ransom. King Mithridates regarded the pirates as potential auxiliaries alongside his own fleet – many were perhaps his own subjects, or at least supporters – and he offered them safe havens. The king had also formed an alliance with Sertorius, some of whose Roman officers were engaged to modernize the Pontic army. These hostile alliances and war preparations reflected Mithridates’s growing fears for the survival of his kingdom, regarded by the Romans as the principal ‘rogue state’ in the East.

  The crisis broke in 74 BC. Mithridates’s allies in Spain and at sea were under heavy military pressure. Sertorius faced Roman armies
augmented to 50,000 men pushing into the Celtiberian heartland of central Spain. The pirates lost most of their bases along the southern shore of Asia Minor to a systematic Roman campaign begun in 77 BC, and finally risked being driven from the Eastern Mediterranean entirely. The Kingdom of Bithynia, a buffer state between the Roman province of Asia and Mithridates’s Pontus, was bequeathed to the Republic by the childless King Nicomedes III, a bequest the Senate readily accepted. As well as providing rich revenues, the acquisition threatened to bring the Roman army on to the Pontic border, and to close off the Black Sea entrance to Pontic trade and warships. In rapid response, Mithridates’s remodelled army launched a pre-emptive strike and overran Bithynia.

  At this moment, committed to major wars in Spain, the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, the Republic was suddenly confronted with a mortal threat to its survival in Italy itself. In 73 BC, in the South Italian town of Capua, some 70 gladiators armed themselves with kitchen utensils, killed their guards, and escaped from their training school. They headed for nearby Mount Vesuvius – looming menacingly over the luxuria of the Bay of Naples – and from here they raided aristocratic estates, freed the slaves, and shared out booty equally. As news of their exploits spread, others came to join them. When they defeated a detachment of soldiers sent from Rome, the trickle of recruits became a flood.

  The number of slaves in Italy was now very high, perhaps a third of the population in total, and more like half in parts of the South. As well as working in mines and quarries, on public construction projects, in the arena and the brothels, and as servants in rich households, huge and increasing numbers were used to work the land. Replacing the free Italian peasants who had once voted for the Gracchi or marched with Marius, the slaves worked mainly on large and medium-sized estates formed from the absorption of failed farmsteads. Brigaded together, brutally coerced and overworked, yet often with vivid memories of families, farms and a life of freedom now lost, they formed a potentially revolutionary class. Though drawn from all parts of the empire, many were from the East, and the Greek spoken there became the language of slaves generally. Many, moreover, were educated, had worked as minor officials, or were former soldiers. Herein lay the rudiments of political and military organization. All that was required to detonate slave revolution was the spark of brilliant leadership. This was now provided by the trainee gladiator who had led the original breakout at Capua: a former soldier from Thrace (Bulgaria) called Spartacus. Within a year, the whole of Roman Italy was convulsed by revolt. Tens of thousands marched with Spartacus, from the Bay of Naples to the Po Valley, and several Roman armies sent against them were crushed. Rome seemed face-to-face with Nemesis. It had transported millions of the victims of its wars to labour as slaves on Italian estates, and now the slaves had turned on their masters with bitter anger. The war had truly come home.