by M. J. Trow
Such was the size of Caesar’s ego – it easily matched those of Crassus and Pompey – that he stood for the post of Pontifex Maximus in 63. Because this was regarded as the pinnacle of a career, which was usually given to middle-aged men who had already been censors and consuls, it was virtually earmarked for Quintus Lutatius Catulus who had been censor with Crassus two years earlier. It seemed the height of folly to a traditionalist people like the Romans that this johnny-come-lately should get the job ahead of wiser and more experienced men.
It was impossible by now for Caesar to keep out of the tangled web of Roman power-politics. Some men would have retired to their country estates, grown vines and disciplined slaves in the latifundia. But Caesar was not ‘some men’. He unwisely became involved in the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catalina, a dangerously unstable member of an ancient family in decline. Unable to afford the massive bribes necessary to become consul, Catalina drifted ever further into the revolutionary camp, demanding that laws be passed to wipe out debt (he himself owed a fortune) and was fought every step of the way by Cicero in the senate.
The great orator was in his finest hour, but the accusations he flung at Cataline proved to be an epitaph for the Republic itself.
In [Cataline’s] bands are all the gamblers and adulterers, all the unclean and shameless citizenry. His witty, delicate boys have learned not only to love and be loved, but to use a dagger and to administer poison. If they are not driven out; if they don’t die ... then I warn you, the school of Cataline will take root in our republic.36
Unfortunately for Rome, the school of Cataline was also the school of Publius Clodius Pulcher, and of Pompey and Caesar. Where the last two could and would use their loyal legions to attack each other, and to cow Rome into submission to them, Clodius used the mob to the same effect. Throughout the 50s, street fighting between factions was commonplace, with elections, speeches and even trials ending in mayhem with blood and cracked heads. Cicero was kicked out of the senate and of Rome; Clodius supervised first the ransacking then the physical demolition of his town house. On another occasion, Pompey had to barricade himself in to avoid an Alexandrian-style tearing apart by the mob.
Caesar himself escaped the worst of this. Praetor in 62, he was suspended from office for recommending that Metellus Caecilius Nepos’ idea be accepted by the senate of giving Pompey a field command against Cataline who at one point joined his legions outside Rome and simply declared himself consul, thereby wiping out at a stroke the whole raison d’être of the Republic.
In this tumultuous period, Caesar divorced Pompeia on the wildly improbable grounds of suspicion of adultery (but in reality because her family could help him climb no higher), famously claiming that she must be ‘above suspicion’.
The propraetor post gave Caesar an army command in Hispania Ulterior (Western Spain) and he quickly developed the strategies for which he was famous. He harassed and bullied even friendly tribes into making war and then beat them, consolidating Rome’s power over the whole peninsula. He helped himself to large amounts of loot and wiped out his own debts that way, returning to Rome for a triumph and every chance of being consul. Here, however, he was blocked by envious senators spearheaded by Marcus Porcius Cato (the Younger) who was Tribune of the Plebs that year and hated everything the brash general stood for. The mob might see every Caesarean victory as a triumph for Rome and the inevitable march of civilization and progress, but to at least half the senate the man was a war criminal. Caesar was denied his triumph (no general at the head of his army could enter Rome without the senate’s permission) and he was given instead command of legions in Italy on the grounds that since the revolt of Spartacus there were still bands of marauding slaves all over the place. This was virtually a policeman’s job and Caesar wanted none of it. Persuading the old rivals Pompey and Crassus to work together must have taken all his ingenuity, but it worked and the three of them were, by 59, the ‘three-headed monster’ of the triumvirate. Crassus was the richest man in Rome; Pompey and Caesar between them had cornered the market in military prowess. They were unstoppable, especially by Caesar’s co-consul, Cicero’s stooge Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus.
Caesar got what he wanted – land reforms for his veterans and a command in Gaul that would turn him into a legend. Pompey got his eastern campaign ratified by the senate after years of wrangling. Crassus lined his purse even more and got command of an army against the Parthians, which would kill him. Bibulus, outmanoeuvred at every turn, retired to private life and took to watching the stars for portents. After that, he always spoke of the consulship of ‘Julius and Caesar’. Increasingly, Pompey and Crassus were beginning to think the same thing.
As far as Egypt was concerned, the only Roman of the triumvirate who truly mattered was Pompey. When the three had joined forces in 60, Ptolemy Auletes appealed to the man’s ego – and his love of cash – by offering him and Caesar (the Piper was presumably hedging his bets) 6,000 silver talents, half his annual revenue, to be recognized as Egypt’s rightful king. Five years earlier Crassus had proposed in the senate that Rome annex Egypt as she had done with so many previously independent territories. That was rejected, as was the suggestion by the tribune Publius Servilius Rullus that Romans had a right to Egyptian land since the Republic had been named the heirs of Ptolemy VIII. But the hieroglyphs were on the wall as far as Egyptian independence was concerned and Auletes gave Pompey a gold crown for the services he rendered fighting alongside Egyptian troops in Palestine. Auletes was now in the hopeless financial ‘catch-22’ of having to borrow from Roman moneylenders to pay Roman politicians to stay out of Egypt. Chief among the moneylenders was Gaius Rabirius Postumus and his work was successful enough in the short term; Auletes became officially amicus et socinus populi Romani, friend and ally of the Roman people. This was not empty rhetoric, but a legal contract in which Auletes held on to his throne as long as the money rolled in. How he was supposed to screw yet more money in taxation from his oppressed people at a time of Nile flooding, poor harvests and strikes was his problem.
This ignominious grovelling was in stark contrast to Auletes’ brother Ptolemy, whose Cyprus was seized by Rome in 58. The excuse, which may have been justified, was that Ptolemy was aiding Cilician pirates against Rome. He was offered the role of high priest but, unable to bear the demotion from king, committed suicide instead.
Ironically, it was this failure of Auletes to help his brother that led to the Alexandrian coup against him and his replacement by his eldest daughter Berenice IV who called her aunt Cleopatra V (Auletes’ sister and ex-wife) out of exile to rule with her. It was now that Auletes and his second daughter, our Cleopatra, began the wanderings we looked at in Chapter 5. In Rhodes, the vagabond king had his humiliating meeting with Marcus Porcius Cato sitting on the toilet before faring rather better in Athens and finally arriving in Italy.
The eleven-year-old Cleopatra’s first visit to Rome took place in less than auspicious circumstances. Pompey, with his Alexander the Great hairstyle and pushy swagger, gave the pair and their small entourage his villa in the Alba Hills, south of Rome, but it hardly equated with the royal palace in Alexandria. The royal pair may or may not have been aware that the worship of foreign gods had been banned only six months before – an example of the increasing arrogance of the Roman establishment – but popular outcry had led to something of a U-turn and the new temple of Isis on Monte Ginesto may have been a familiar place for them to visit.
Knowing that Auletes was sucking up to the Romans, Berenice and Cleopatra Tryphaena sent a delegation to the senate to lobby against him. Auletes outmanoeuvred them with a combination of threats and bribery. It was at this juncture that the over-mighty Julius Caesar tried to get himself elected as governor of Egypt, undermining both Auletes and Pompey. He too failed and was, perhaps to keep him quiet and out of the way, given a command in Gaul, where he started as he meant to go on by provoking a war with the generally amicable Helvetii and smashing them in the process.
We have already seen that the death of Cleopatra Tryphaena threw Berenice into a panic. Her desperate search for a new co-ruler only produced the salt-fish seller who she had strangled after a week of marriage. His replacement, in the dog-eat-dog world of the Ptolemies, was Archelaos, the son of a general of Mithridates VI of Pontus who bribed the Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, to keep out of it. But Pompey had other ideas. If Caesar had failed to get Egypt, he would not. He paid Gabinius 10,000 talents to reinstate Auletes – the man would then owe him the greatest of favours.
The triumphal entry of Auletes and the fourteen-year-old Cleopatra into Alexandria was something of a watershed. The very presence of Roman troops – Mark Antony commanded Gabinius’ cavalry – spoke volumes as to who really ruled Egypt. It was now that Auletes, spiteful to the last, had his own daughter Berenice executed, and only Antony’s personal intervention prevented a wholesale Ptolemaic bloodbath. Antony’s troops, mostly Gauls and Germans, stayed on in the city as a peace-keeping force, although it was not clear who was in more danger – the Alexandrians from Ptolemy or vice versa.
While Caesar was making a name for himself subduing Gaul and even invading the land at the very edge of civilization – Britannia – young Cleopatra continued her education before taking her rightful place alongside her father as co-ruler. The moneylender Rabirius accepted Auletes’ offer to make him finance minister as part of the repayment, but he became so unpopular as a harsh tax collector that he had to be given a permanent bodyguard of Gauls. He ran back to Rome along with the increasingly suspect Gabinius and both men were accused of un-Roman behaviour by wearing Greek clothes! Cicero witheringly described Gabinius as a ‘thieving effeminate ballet boy in curlers’.37
Caesar’s war in Gaul is seen today as the work of a master strategist and tactician, which it was. It is also invaluable to historians as a description of the Roman war machine at work. But above all it is a piece of propaganda, and his contemporaries saw it in the simplest of terms – Caesar was lining his purse and turning himself into a hero, probably to outdo Pompey. A faction in Rome headed by Gaius Domitius Ahenobarbus planned to recall Caesar and prosecute him for alleged war crimes. Certainly the loss of life among the Gallic population was horrendous and even in an age when life was cheap there were those who felt he had much to answer for.
Even though the triumvirs met at Lucca in northern Italy and effectively renewed Caesar’s Gallic contract, the very absence of the general from the hub of things lost him impetus. Crassus, too, was losing his grip. Perhaps he always intended to hide in the shadows as a string-puller, waiting for his moment, but if so, it never came. Pompey was winning laurels in the east against the Cilician pirates; Caesar was carving up Gaul. Crassus had only one clear victory to his name and although Spartacus was possibly more of a general than anyone Pompey or Caesar faced, his was still an army of slaves and there was no glory in that. Because of that, Crassus, having served as co-consul with Pompey for a second time, insisted on a five-year command in the east.
It was perhaps unfortunate for him that his enemies were the skilled and resourceful Parthians whose cataphracts (heavy cavalry) could smash through Roman infantry, even when that infantry were the formidable legions. At Carrhae (Haran in modern Turkey) in 53 Crassus was stopped in his tracks and his son Publius was killed. In ‘peace talks’ the next day Crassus was struck down as he tried to mount his horse. His head and hand were hacked off and sent to Armenia. The head of the richest man in Rome would make one last appearance. In the celebrations after Carrhae, a Greek play was staged for the Parthian generals. During it, an actor dressed as a maenad, a devotee of Dionysus so loved by Auletes and so detested by Rome, threw the head in the air and it was kicked from player to player in the sand.
In the previous year, the last family link between the two remaining triumvirs was broken. Pompey’s fourth wife was Julia Caesar, the daughter of the conqueror of Gaul. There is little doubt that Pompey genuinely loved her, but she died in childbirth and an ambitious, successful Roman was obliged to remarry. His choice was typically quirky and political. Cornelia was the daughter of Caecilius Metellus Scipio and the widow of the Publius Crassus killed at Carrhae. She was sophisticated and beautiful, but more importantly linked to the family of the Scipio who had defeated Hannibal and destroyed Carthage. It was like marrying into the Kennedy family in late-twentieth-century America. The marriage – Pompey’s fifth – saw him move out of Caesar’s camp for ever. And Pompey didn’t put a foot wrong. He staged the most lavish games Rome had ever seen in September 55, with elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, leopards, wolves and even a cephos, an Ethiopian animal with the feet of a man that was probably a baboon, all of them urged to fight each other and end their days screaming in agony on the spearheads and tridents of the bestiarii, the animal gladiators.
There is no doubt that Pompey regarded himself as the most powerful man in Rome. He had served twice as consul and was still governor of Spain with a formidable military reputation, yet in the elections that followed the games, his bid to bribe the electorate with bread and circuses failed. Domitius Ahenobarbus was consul for 54 and Cato was praetor. Increasingly, Cato set himself up as the man of the Republic, creaking though it obviously was. He had no armies at his back, unlike both Pompey and Caesar. He had no money, unlike the recently deceased Crassus, to bribe men to vote for him. He just stood for honesty and that which was most dear to all Romans, tradition.
But it all turned to ashes. By 53–52 charges of corruption were being levelled at Ahenobarbus and his fellow consul Appius Claudius Pulcher (the Handsome) and street fighting broke out between Cato’s thug Titus Annius Milo and Clodius, the youngest of Appius Claudius’ sons. Using street gangs and gladiators from the training schools, both men indulged in open warfare in which nobody’s life was safe. Things came to a head on the night of 18 January 52 when Milo and Clodius met face to face. In the scuffle that followed, Clodius was hit in the shoulder with a javelin and he was carried, bleeding profusely, to a tavern along the Appian Way, Milo’s men in hot pursuit. They dragged him outside and hacked him to death.
It was in the nature of things that matters could not rest there. Clodius was ever a man of the people – even the spelling of his name reflected the plebs’ pronunciation of Claudius – and the mob went on the rampage in revenge, almost exactly as they would with the murder of Caesar twelve years later. They smashed their way into the senate house the next day and built a pyre for Clodius from the shattered furniture. The blaze destroyed the entire building and the law courts next door. The superstitious Romans got the point – the Republic was a burned-out husk.
In desperation the senate turned to Pompey. They granted him the consulship as long as he restored law and order. This was halfway to dictatorship and it had been achieved as far as Pompey was concerned without bloodshed. Now he unleashed his legions, beating the street gangs at their own game. Milo was put on trial for the murder of Clodius and even the renowned orator Cicero, charged with defending him, was overawed by the unthinkable – a ring of shields around the Forum. Milo was found guilty and got off lightly by being allowed to sail into exile in Marseille, in Caesar’s Gaul.
Ptolemy the Piper died on 7 March 51 during a partial solar eclipse, the gods, as always, marking the coming and the going of a demi-god. There is debate how old he was, but he was probably sixty, and after a turbulent life – and unlike most of the Ptolemies – his death was due to natural causes. His will, which had been ratified by the Roman senate, when they weren’t screaming at each other, stipulated that Cleopatra Thea Philopator, the father-loving goddess, should rule jointly with her ten-year-old brother Ptolemy XIII. It is at least likely that Cleopatra kept the news of the old king’s death secret except to her innermost circle for as long as she could. It is difficult to be sure but there seems to have been no love lost between the siblings and when a petulant little boy happens to be co-ruler of a great country and heir of a great dynasty, the petty rivalries of the nursery assume gig
antic and horrific proportions. Ptolemy’s advisers might have staged a coup to remove Cleopatra, even though she was eighteen and had almost certainly been ruling alongside her father for the last eighteen months. It was not until 30 June that Rome heard of Auletes’ death, by which time the king had been embalmed in the Egyptian tradition with its ten-week ritual of binding, amulet-placing and incense.
The will of Auletes was copied – one version was placed on the stone shelves of the great library in Alexandria; the other went to Pompey’s villa near Rome. Ominously for the last of the Ptolemies, the Roman people were declared guardians and protectors of the land of Egypt.
Nobody except Cleopatra missed Auletes. Latterly he had given lavish banquets paid for by taxing the Egyptian people, drank himself into a stupor and had indiscriminate sex with male and female teenagers. Even so, Cleopatra and her brother inherited a throne protected by the greatest military power in the world and the priesthood backed them both as pharaohs in a tradition that was centuries old.
10
CROSSING THE RIVERS
THE RUBICON, 49
One of Cleopatra’s first acts as queen was to honour the Buchis bull. A funerary stela now in the Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen reads:
The queen, the lady of the Two Lands, the Goddess Philopator, rowed [the bull] in the boat of Amun, together with the other boats of the king, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis and priests being with [them].38
This was standard practice; in fact, the exact form of words can be found in earlier carved records. What it proves is that Egypt welcomed the new queen with open arms and there is a smooth sense of continuity from Auletes. The Buchis bull belonged to the complex religious rites we saw in Book One, an animal chosen because it was identified with Osiris, the fertility-god and god of the Underworld; with Montu, the warrior-god, and with the sun-god Ra. Montu was identified by the Alexandrian Greeks as Apollo because of his links with the sun. His later effigies, those from Cleopatra’s reign, show him as a bull-headed man in the Minotaur tradition, with two tall plumes fixed to his horns. He carried the khepesh, a curved sword, and in many bas-reliefs from the New Kingdom is shown offering the weapon to pharaoh to enable the man to defeat his enemies. As we have seen, the Egyptians brought offerings to the animal, its horns bedecked with garlands and it could predict the future and cure the sick. It even changed colour every hour, and to encourage fertility, women appeared in front of it, according to a horrified Herodotus, exposing their genitals. When the bull died it was mummified and laid to rest in a ceremony called the Bucheion in Greek at Hermonthis on the Nile, south of Thebes.