Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Pharsalus was a tactical masterpiece and one of history’s most decisive battles. The Pompeian cause was henceforward broken-backed. Even so, the war dragged on. Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt with a small force, but the cavalier and partisan manner in which he intervened in an internal dynastic dispute between Ptolemy XII and his sister and co-regent Cleopatra provoked a violent response, and Caesar spent the winter of 48–47 BC under siege in the city of Alexandria. Relief came in the spring, but by that time Pompeian resistance had flared up across the empire. Caesarian celeritas (speed) was never more evident. First he went to Asia Minor to crush the revolt of a Pompeian client-prince in a five-day war (veni, vidi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered). Then to Rome to confront and defuse a mutiny of returning veterans – including men of Caesar’s crack Tenth Legion – disappointed by their rewards after Pharsalus. The following year (46 BC) he invaded Africa, where Quintus Metellus Scipio had raised an army of ten Roman and four Numidian legions. Caesar crossed in winter gales and immediately sought battle. He engineered a confrontation on a narrow headland near Thapsus, without room for manoeuvre or outflanking, so that his enemies’ shaky infantry were compelled to face a frontal charge by Caesar’s veterans. So confident were Caesar’s men that they charged before the order was given, catching the Pompeians still trying to deploy; in the rout that followed the veterans gave no quarter and the battle degenerated into massacre. Ten thousand were killed, including almost all the Pompeian hierarchy. Marcus Cato, left in charge of a garrison, committed suicide when he got the news.

  The final and most ghastly battle was fought in Spain, the oldest of Pompey’s fiefdoms. Here his sons had raised an army of 13 legions, and when Caesar, with an army barely half the size, found them holding a strong defensive position on a hill near Munda in the spring of 45 BC, his decision to attack was a calculated risk: the Pompeians could not be drawn to fight on equal terms, yet the war would not end unless their army was destroyed. The Caesarians launched a difficult uphill attack and were soon bogged down in protracted and murderous close-quarters fighting. The line wavered under Pompeian counter-attacks. Caesar himself entered the front ranks to stiffen resolve. Before his men finally broke through they had lost 6,000 – the heaviest casualties of Caesar’s career – and as their enemies ran, the Caesarian soldiery, driven mad by blood and fear, killed everyone they could reach, amounting to some 30,000 Pompeians.

  Caesar and his men had won the civil war because they were masters of the battlefield. Their opponents were weakened by divided counsels, a dispersal of strength, and dependence on raw levies in Greece, Africa and Spain. But there was something more: Caesar was both conciliator and popularis. Magnanimous towards defeated enemies and solicitous of civilians endangered by war, he easily won the sympathy of the uncommitted. And wearing the mantle of the Gracchi and of Marius, he garnered strong support from that inchoate coalition for reform – the equestrians, the Italian municipal aristocracy, the city poor, the farmers, the newly enfranchised, those aspiring to citizenship, soldiers past and present – that had rendered Late Republican Rome ungovernable. It is surely significant that after the campaign of 49 BC Rome and Italy, though stripped of troops, were safe for Caesar: there was no Pompeian rising here.

  Those, moreover, who had supported Caesar in the war were not to be disappointed. After decades of obstruction by the oligarchs of privilege, a raft of reforms was initiated between 49 and 44 BC: state regulation of credit and a reduction of debts; remission of rents; proper town planning and traffic regulation in Rome; a major programme of public building, including a new forum adjacent to the old; tighter regulation of the corn-dole; a succession of spectacles and feasts in the capital; a pay rise from 120 to 225 denarii for legionaries, and a huge bonus of 5,000 denarii each for Caesar’s veterans in 46 BC; 30 new colonies for the settlement of 80,000 citizens and their families; regulation of municipal government in Italy; major land reclamation works in the Italian countryside; the enfranchisement of the Cisalpine Gauls; selective grants of Roman citizenship to many other upper-class provincials, and the award of ‘municipal’ status to their towns; reductions in provincial taxation. Pharsalus had opened a new era. The ancien régime was overthrown, and a stalled revolution burst into creative life, remodelling the Roman Empire for the centuries to come.

  But there was no clean end. Caesar in Rome in the winter of 45–44 BC found himself surrounded by embittered, unreconstructed enemies. His constitutional position was, perforce, highly irregular. He had taken emergency powers as dictator rei publicae constituendae causa (dictator for the reconstitution of the state) for the duration of the civil war, but he could hardly abdicate that position now and hand back to his enemies the power to destroy him they had lost on the battlefield. His beleaguered government was staffed with loyalists – the Senate was packed with Caesarians, virtually all higher magistracies, including provincial governorships, were held by appointees, equestrians were welcomed to the highest councils of the state, and a burgeoning administration of minor officials was constructed. The Senate was sidelined. A parallel state structure formed alongside it. Civil war had created a military dictator who had usurped a position of dominance over his former peers in the Senate. To maintain himself, to reward his followers, to reform state and society, he was compelled to make his dictatorship permanent and create a government bureaucracy to ensure its effectiveness. A cult of personality developed around him – he was dubbed ‘Father of the Fatherland’, his head appeared on coins, and expressions of political loyalty to the ruler were already morphing into acts of worship for a god. He appeared to stalwarts of the old order a king in all but name, his pointed rejection of the hated title rex the flimsiest fig-leaf. On 14th February 44 BC, Caesar made himself dictator perpetuus (dictator for life), donned the purple robes of a king, and seated himself on a new ivory and gilt throne. He was known to be preparing for a great campaign of conquest in the East: a new Alexander was in the making, one in whose shadow all other men might shrivel. Such was not the Roman way. A month later, on 15th March, as he entered a meeting of the Senate in the Theatre of Pompey, Gaius Julius Caesar was boxed in by a crowd of senators and felled by multiple dagger wounds. He died in a pool of blood at the base of the statue of his greatest enemy.

  A new Caesar: the Second Triumvirate, 43–31 BC

  The Republic was dead but not yet buried. Tim Cornell has summarized matters well: ‘With the beginning of the Civil Wars, the Republic, defined as the rule of magistrates, senate and people of Rome, was already dead. Since 60 BC control of affairs had passed from the oligarchy to the dynasts, who were supported by their private armies and clientelae, and were constitutionally provided for by special commands which freed them from the restrictions of the system of annual collegiate magistracies. The oligarchy that Sulla restored had shown itself to be irresponsible, corrupt, self-seeking and indifferent, and no longer commanded the respect or loyalty of any significant group in society. The propertied classes of Italy had no confidence in a regime which excluded their leading men from senior positions and was unable to guarantee order and stability; the poor happily surrendered their spurious freedoms and ineffectual political rights in favour of individual leaders who depended on them for support and who consequently took care to supply their material needs. The position of Pompey in the mid-50s … already fore-shadowed that of the emperors.’(20) To this I would add that the dynasts had been able to usurp power because the oligarchy’s social base had been eroded by the expansion of the empire, the rise of new classes, and the consequent dislocation of the old order of state and society – changes which had engendered a revolutionary crisis. But because the dynasts at the same time fought for themselves – for personal power within the existing system – the leadership they offered remained inchoate. For this reason there was no clear break: the end was messy and protracted, and the Republic remained a wraithlike presence now and for a century or more to come.

  Pompey, for instance, was diverted from the role of
reforming dictator by his rivalry with Caesar. But Cornell is surely right to see the First Triumvirate as a transitional government heralding the end of the Republic and the creation of the Principate. Until this time, Roman politics had been intermittently shaped by the intervention of warlords, but, between bouts of open war, the politicians, the Senate and the Concordia Ordinum had retained a fragile grip. Never again after 60 BC. The highest point of senatorial politics henceforward was to choose between masters. The Senate, anyway, was transformed in the civil-war generation: many of the old families, some claiming descent from noble ancestors centuries before, were consumed by battle, execution and purge; the triumvirs filled the empty seats – and more (the Senate grew from several hundred to a thousand) – with loyalist ‘new men’. An ‘aristocracy of the robe’, sitting by hereditary right, was gradually replaced by an ‘aristocracy of office’, men who had risen to the top through military and administrative service under the triumvirs.

  Some men, though, could not stomach the subservience on which careers now depended. They resented the regal airs of those who had once been their peers; the arrogance of the sometimes low-born favourites and flunkies of the triumviral retinues; the shrivelling away of ancient nobility, of Roman traditions, of an ordered world where men knew their place, where privilege, property and power were safe. It was 60 to 80 such men, led by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, who had formed the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar. In its aftermath, there was at first turmoil, and some must have hoped to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. But they deluded themselves. As men adjusted and the new situation crystallized into alliances and blocs, it was soon apparent that the birth of a new order was irreversible.

  First, however, the confusion, the fog of events unfolding. The Roman polity that Caesar’s dictatorship had momentarily strapped together had burst apart; no one was sure what would replace it. Mark Antony and other Caesarian leaders, as eager as other members of the ruling class to avoid a repetition of the riots that had followed Clodius’s death in 52 BC, at first formed a common front with the Senate against disorder. Leading assassins were even appointed to top posts. But conservatives feared Antony as the new Caesar. Cicero delivered a series of excoriating speeches modelled on those of Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon three centuries before (thus, the Philippics). Ironically, it was the dead man who seemed to have bequeathed the optimates their strongest weapon. Lacking a legitimate son, Caesar had named his 19-year-old great-nephew Gaius Octavianus his adoptive son and heir to his estate. The young man thus became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, conventionally known (now but not then) as Octavian.

  Octavian was a complete unknown. Though his maternal grandmother was Julius Caesar’s sister, his father belonged to an obscure Italian municipal family from Velitrae. Octavian himself was still in the East when news reached him of his elevation. Surely this youth and ‘new man’ suddenly cast into the storm-centre of Roman politics would allow himself to be guided by the great men of the Senate? So at first it seemed. Courted and flattered by Cicero and others when he arrived in Rome, Octavian raised an army in alliance with the Senate and advanced against Antony early in 43 BC. Antony, who had been conducting a half-hearted siege against the assassin Decimus Brutus at Mutina in northern Italy, retreated in the face of overwhelming force into the old Caesarian power-base of Gaul. By the summer he had raised a new army and resumed the offensive. He drove Decimus Brutus from Mutina and opened the way south to Rome. All-out war between the two Caesarian leaders seemed possible.

  But Octavian’s position straddled a contradiction and was unsustainable. He had raised an army in Caesar’s name but was asking it to fight for the Senate against a Caesarian army. The soldiers were restless and their loyalty could not be guaranteed. Even if they fought and won, their victory could only weaken the Caesarian cause overall. And if they lost? There is evidence that Octavian was a physical coward. Certainly he was no general. He cannot have been sanguine about the prospect of battle against Antony’s legions. He was untried. His reputation rested on his adoptive name alone. Defeat might extinguish his career at the outset. Above all was the simple fact that, because Octavian was his adoptive father’s son and a Caesarian leader, he could not risk fighting a civil war within Caesar’s party as the candidate of the Senate. Determined as he was to destroy his rival for the party leadership, he had been naïve to think he could achieve this in alliance with Cicero. In July 43 BC, therefore, Octavian took control of Rome in a military coup and revoked the amnesty for Caesar’s assassins. He then made overtures to Antony.

  Three Caesarian leaders, Octavian, Antony and Marcus Lepidus, commander of the Gallic legions, met at Bononia in northern Italy to form ‘the Second Triumvirate’ (though real power rested with the first two, Lepidus’s most important role being to offset the rivalry of the principals). They then set about destroying their enemies. Three hundred senators (including Cicero) and 2,000 equestrians were proscribed and executed, and their family estates confiscated. A new cult of divus Iulius (divine Julius) was inaugurated. The empire was divided into three geographical zones, each ruled by a triumvir, but with Italy for the time being shared. Having settled matters thus, the triumvirs then prepared for war against the assassins Brutus and Cassius, who were raising a Republican army in Greece. The Caesarians crossed the Adriatic and marched into Macedonia to confront the Republicans the following year (42 BC). Antony and Octavian fought two battles near Philippi, the first against Cassius, the second, three weeks later, against Brutus: in both the Republicans were defeated, and the respective leaders committed suicide; captured officers were executed, while the rank and file were incorporated into the Caesarian army.

  The Caesarians had drawn back from a private civil war in order to crush resurgent Republicanism, first in a military coup in Rome, then on the battlefield at Philippi. Lepidus had been marginalized by events. Antony had achieved temporary dominance by virtue of his successful military leadership. Octavian emerged with his power-base intact but his reputation tarnished. His alliance with the Senate in 44 BC followed by his abrupt volte-face and the military coup of 43 BC marked him as an ambitious opportunist without principle or honour. He was also an enthusiastic murderer. The bloody purge that followed the coup was in stark contrast to his adoptive father’s policy of clemency, and his treatment of defeated enemies after Philippi was boorish and brutal; so much so, Suetonius tells us, that ‘the prisoners, while being led off in chains, courteously saluted Antony as their conqueror, but abused Augustus [Octavian] to his face with the most obscene epithets.’(21) Weak, untalented, immoral, self-serving, arrogant, murderous: all these words applied to Octavian, and it is astonishing that this truly disgusting man has been admired by a succession of ancient historians mesmerized by the image-makers of the Augustan regime. He was in fact one of history’s bloody tyrants.

  The triumvirs now reapportioned their enlarged domain. Lepidus received Africa, Octavian took most of the West, including Rome and Italy, and Antony became responsible for the East. If some final showdown between the two leading triumvirs was inevitable, it was postponed for many years by the demands and distractions of their respective spheres. The division appeared to favour Antony. The East was richer and it offered an opportunity for military glory in the resurrection of Caesar’s planned Parthian campaign. Octavian’s share seemed, by contrast, both unglamorous and dangerous.