The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  Ancient writers’ views of Caesar’s assassination depend very much upon their attitude to the imperial system. Suetonius (AD 69–130), who hoped that his accounts of the lives of the emperors would provide examples for future rulers, was in no doubt that it was fully justified: Caesar, he claimed, had abrogated his leadership responsibilities by failing to pay due respect either to fellow members of Rome’s élite or to the institutions of the Republic. By contrast, the Greek biographer Plutarch (c. AD 46–120, in his Parallel Lives) described Julius Caesar’s death as a catastrophe that upset the natural order of the world. As for Caesar himself, he is reported to have said, with characteristic acuity and foresight, that if he were assassinated the result would be chaos. But what were Caesar’s origins and how had both his own life and that of Rome in general proceeded up to his untimely death in 44 BC?

  The Julii Caesares

  Gaius Julius Caesar was born into the patrician class – the hereditary aristocratic ruling élite of Rome – in 100 BC. His family claimed descent from extraordinarily exalted ancestors, in the shape of both of the legendary founders of Rome – Aeneas and Romulus. Furthermore, through these mortal forebears they were also connected to two deities: Aeneas was thought to have been born to the goddess Venus and a man named Anchises, while Romulus was the offspring of a woman of noble background, Rhea Silvia, who gave birth to him and his twin brother Remus after being raped by the god Mars. The legend goes on to relate how the twins were set adrift on the River Tiber but were saved by divine intervention and went on to found the city of Rome.

  With two gods in the family tree, most of the early Julii Caesares lacked any real incentive to enhance the earthly status of their family. For most of their history they pursued a languid aristocratic lifestyle that left almost no mark on the annals of Rome. It was only with the election of Julius Caesar’s uncle as a consul and the later accession of his father to the office of praetor that the family attained any kind of prominence. However, the most significant of all Caesar’s immediate forebears was not a male relative at all but rather his aunt Julia (c.130–69 BC), who in c.110 BC raised the profile of her family at a stroke through her marriage to Gaius Marius, the most renowned Roman of the age.

  The career of Gaius Marius (157–86 BC) was as glorious as it was unexpected. He was not born a patrician and so could not call upon a long lineage of illustrious ancestors to advance his political career. A further handicap was that he came not from Rome but from the town of Arpinum, some 60 miles (100 kilometres) distant. Rather, Marius’ rise to power was based on sheer personal ability combined with a talent for ruthlessly eliminating anyone who stood in his path. In the 20 years before Caesar’s birth, Marius carved out a niche for himself as an expert on military affairs, at a time when the governing élite was experiencing a dearth of talented military tacticians and commanders from among its own ranks. Exploiting the political scandals sparked by a series of military fiascos, including a disastrous war in North Africa and several badly botched campaigns in southern France, Marius succeeded in getting himself elected consul in the face of determined opposition from the patrician establishment. In his new role, he swiftly brought the war in Africa to a successful conclusion. As if to underline Marius’ skill and his opponents’ ineptitude, just as he was ending his campaign, two Roman generals in southern France saw their armies wiped out by invading German tribesmen on the same day; this disaster arose from their pigheaded refusal to cooperate with each other.

  Marius was elected consul for a second time in 105 BC (and would be re-elected every year thereafter until 100 BC – his final tally of seven consulships was hitherto unparalleled in Roman history). That same year, he took command of the demoralized armies in southern France and northern Italy. In developing his career through his military prowess, Marius moulded himself into the first princeps, a military strong man who used his army power base to exert political control. Marius’ example would prove a potent model for his as yet unborn nephew.

  By 100, Marius had defeated the German invaders and shortly thereafter retired from public life, since he was by then in his sixties. Yet the situation in Rome continued to worsen, for which Marius himself may have been partly to blame. The major reforms he instituted in the Roman army had forged a strong bond between himself and his men that far outstripped the loyalty they felt towards the government of the Republic. The principal reason for their disaffection had to do with money. The average period of service for a Roman soldier had grown considerably over time; moreover, many men spent much of their tour of duty in provincial garrisons and no coherent plan existed for their retirement. Whether soldiers ultimately received any recompense for their years of service depended entirely upon how well connected their commanding officers were in political circles. A general with influence would secure special terms – usually land grants – for his men when they retired from the army. Marius had been one such commander, and his generosity had even extended to granting non-Romans citizenship in recognition of their loyal service.

  Land and citizenship

  The issue of who was entitled to be a Roman citizen was fast becoming the burning question of the day. In 100 BC, most inhabitants of Italy were not actually citizens of Rome. The towns where they lived were nominally allied to the Roman state through treaties imposed on them during Rome’s victorious wars of expansion in the fourth and third centuries BC. Since then, they had reluctantly taken the role of Roman vassal states. But in 133 BC this uneasy peace had been shattered by the agitation of a plebeian tribune named Tiberius Gracchus (163–133 BC).

  Concerned at the decline he perceived in Roman virtus (the quality of manly courage and steadfastness), Gracchus concluded that this was the upshot of many Romans abandoning traditional life on the family farm. His suggested remedy was a law redistributing land that Rome had originally seized from the cities of Italy, but which had since been left largely under their control. Gracchus’ legislation infuriated not only the inhabitants of the vassal cities but also many Roman senators, who disapproved of what they regarded as his wilful disruption of the status quo. Although the divisive law was passed, its chief architect promptly paid with his life, murdered by political enemies.

  Ten years later, Gracchus’ younger brother Gaius (154–121 BC) introduced a series of laws designed to further reorganize the state. One of his proposed reforms was that all Italians should be made citizens of Rome. Conservative senators calling themselves ‘the Nobles’ (nobiles), who had opposed Tiberius, were just as outraged by Gaius’ proposals, and, when he failed to win re-election for a third term, they summoned troops into Rome to massacre him and his supporters.

  Over the next two decades, the related issues of land distribution and Roman citizenship arose time and again, but were never resolved. The basic problem was that, while many poor Romans were attracted by the prospect of receiving free land from the state, they were not prepared in return to share the advantages of Roman citizenship with other cities of Italy. Conversely, the Italians would not stand for massive land redistribution unless they were given a stake in governing the country. Marius was thrown headlong into this longrunning controversy in 100 BC, when he deployed his troops to crush the supporters of yet another tribune who was agitating in favour of radical agrarian reforms.

  The rise of Sulla

  The spectre of land distribution and citizenship reared its head once more in 91 BC. When the tribune who was sponsoring the new reform bill suddenly turned out to be dead, the Italians, incensed by years of foot-dragging and abortive attempts at legislation, rose in revolt. Gaius Marius came out of retirement to command one of the armies that Rome put into the field to face them. At the head of another army was Lucius Cornelius Sulla (c. 138–78 BC), formerly a lieutenant of Marius, but now opposed to his former commander. In the course of this so-called Social War – named after the Socii, the Latin term for Rome’s erstwhile Italian allies – Sulla soon proved to be an outstanding general in his own right.

  Two mome
ntous events marked the year 89 BC. First, the Roman state split the Italian resistance by passing a bill offering citizenship to the inhabitants of any city that lay down its arms. Many accepted the offer, and the war turned decisively against those who chose to fight on. At the same time, King Mithridates VI (132–63 BC) of Pontus (a state on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey) launched an attack on Roman lands in the eastern Mediterranean. The senate voted that command in this war, which promised to be a far more profitable and glorious venture than the ongoing mopping-up operations in Italy, should go to one of the consuls for the following year. Sulla was duly elected and put in charge of the campaign against Mithridates.

  Sulla did not hold on to his prize for long. A tribune introduced a group of bills which, in addition to offering Roman citizenship to the Italians on far more favourable terms than before, also transferred command of the Mithridatic War to Marius. Sulla, outraged at what he regarded as an illegal act by the tribune, turned to his army for support. He was easily able to exploit the troops’ anger at being deprived of a chance to share in the spoils that would flow from reconquering the eastern provinces. And so Sulla and his legions marched on Rome to force the senate to rescind its decision. Encountering only minimal resistance, he occupied the city and sentenced his political opponents to death before marching east once more. Meanwhile Marius, who barely escaped with his life, fled to North Africa.

  Before resuming command of the Mithridatic War, Sulla had tried to secure his position in Rome by getting his supporters elected to the two consulships for 87 BC. Yet he failed in this and was forced to witness the election of his sworn enemy Lucius Cornelius Cinna (d. 84 BC) to one of the posts. Sulla had the military might to remove Cinna, but instead let him remain in office provided he swore to uphold the legislation that Sulla had introduced. Cinna lied; shortly after the start of his consulship, he broke his oath and led his own army against Rome. Marius returned from North Africa to join the armies that were now fighting their way into the city, massacring all of Sulla’s supporters who did not flee or go into hiding. At the end of the year, Marius was elected consul for the seventh time, but died soon after taking office.

  Over the following years Sulla succeeded in defeating Mithridates. The spoils of victory were great; not only did he loot vast treasures from the eastern provinces, but his coffers were also swelled by money from Mithridates, whom he had permitted to remain as king of Pontus in return for huge reparations payments. These finances enabled Sulla to reinvade Italy. By the end of 82 BC he had defeated his main enemies and had himself installed as dictator for as long as he wished. Sulla’s dictatorial rule provided an object lesson for later rulers of Rome.

  The bloody regime of Sulla

  Sulla immediately embarked on a reign of terror. During his advance on Rome, he had committed a string of atrocities, including massacring prisoners, executing opposing generals and destroying districts that held out against him. Once installed in the city, Sulla posted lists of men who were ‘proscribed’, namely condemned to death. Although the first targets of Sulla’s proscriptions were his political opponents, soon anyone with property or wealth began to be included. Sulla personally presided over this bloodbath, encouraging bounty hunters to bring him the severed heads of proscribed men in return for a reward. The estates of the victims were confiscated by the state, and for the most part were sold off at knockdown prices to Sulla’s supporters. Those districts of Italy that had supported Sulla’s enemies were subject to massive confiscations of land, which were then divided up into sizeable farms for Sulla’s retired veterans. In the dictator’s savage reckoning, since he could never hope to reconcile his enemies to his newly purified Roman state, the only logical course of action was to kill them and eradicate their former power bases. Yet perversely the sheer brutality of Sulla’s campaign actually succeeded in hardening opposition against him. And so, even though the civil war ended on the main Italian front in 81 BC, desperate men fought on for nearly a decade in more remote Roman outposts such as North Africa, southern France and especially Spain. Further sporadic revolts even occurred in Italy itself. The last and most famous of these was the great rural uprising led by the gladiator Spartacus (c. 100–70 BC); while many of the rebels who took part in it were slaves, it was notable that Spartacus also managed to attract many dispossessed former soldiers to his ranks.

  Sulla lived until 78 BC, resigning his dictatorship a few months before his death, which was probably hastened by his excessive fondness for drink. In a cynical comment on absolute power, Julius Caesar later claimed that Sulla’s decision to retire simply proved that he didn’t know what he was doing. In fact, Caesar was extremely fortunate to have survived Sulla’s reign of terror. According to a story that Caesar himself later put about, he had been on the list of people that Sulla wanted killed. He was only saved by the intervention of friends and the Vestal Virgins. In pardoning him, Sulla is alleged to have remarked that there were ‘many Mariuses’ in the young man. More probably the fact that Caesar’s mother was related to some of Sulla’s most important supporters was the key to his salvation. Still, Rome was not a good place for him to be, and Caesar found it prudent to complete his higher education in Greece until the situation in Rome calmed down.

  The irresistible rise of Caesar

  Caesar’s defining character trait was his great ambition. He won renown as a junior officer in the eastern Mediterranean – Mithridates never gave up his desire to conquer Rome’s eastern holdings, and launched another attack there in 76 BC. Having proved his virtus in war, Caesar returned to Rome and began to rally support among opponents of the political establishment by cultivating a personal style that marked him as a radical. He wore clothes that were generally regarded as too modish and became known as something of a ladies’ man. He also ran up huge debts, and was forced to borrow heavily from one of Sulla’s former generals, Marcus Licinius Crassus (c. 115–53 BC), who had been responsible for suppressing Spartacus’ revolt. Crassus had amassed a vast personal fortune through trading in slaves, mining interests and property speculation. Yet he was an intemperate personality who made many enemies, even falling out with his former ally Sulla. In particular, Crassus was almost pathologically jealous of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, better known as Pompey (106–48 BC). Though still only in his twenties, Pompey had displayed great military skill in Sulla’s service – earning himself the nickname adulescentulus carnifex (‘the teenage butcher’) – and carved out a reputation as Rome’s coming man, despite never having held political office.

  Unfazed by the envy of Crassus, with whom he shared the consulship in 70 BC, Pompey spent most of the 60s commanding Roman armies abroad. When pirates raided the coast of Italy and kidnapped two Roman magistrates, Pompey was charged with the task of sweeping them from the Mediterranean. Within a year, he was claiming outright victory and had engineered his own appointment as commander-in-chief of the Mithridatic War. Pompey brought this conflict to a successful end three years later.

  Caesar, meanwhile, continued to groom his political career. Elected aedile in 65 BC, he restored the trophies of Marius’ victories against the Germans – destroyed by Sulla – to their former place of honour. In the same year he held a lavish public funeral for his aunt, Marius’ widow, and laid claim to the political mantle of Marius himself. During his lifetime, Marius had been anything but a radical, but he now became a rallying point for enemies of the post-Sullan regime. Caesar made sure that he was identified closely with the myth he spun around his uncle.

  In 63 BC Caesar was elected as praetor, setting up a run for the consulship three years later (the interval between the two offices had become statutory for everyone except Pompey, who had never held any office other than consul), and as pontifex maximus, the high priest of Rome. This latter office was more political than religious. The Roman state religion was overseen by several collective priesthoods, of which the most influential were the pontiffs, whose leader Caesar now became. Their main function was to oversee other group
s of priests. The office of pontifex maximus also brought with it several perks, chief among which was occupancy of the Regia in the heart of the Roman Forum. Residing here put Caesar quite literally in the centre of the city’s political life. Yet the two election campaigns also left him deep in debt.

  Manoeuvring for power

  By the end of 62 BC Caesar’s financial problems were so serious that Suetonius recounts that he was obliged to slip out of town in the dead of night to avoid being seized by his creditors. Like many Romans of his day, Caesar saw the opportunity to govern a province – a privilege accorded to praetors either during or after their year in office – as a chance to recoup the enormous sums he had spent while running for office. Political campaigns, then as now, were extremely expensive undertakings, and Caesar had earned a reputation for extravagant spending. In 65 he had purchased so many gladiators for the shows which his post of aedile obliged him to stage that his enemies in the senate passed a law restricting the number of performers any one person could engage. Caesar’s successful contest of the two elections in 63 would have entailed even more lavish outlay. According to Roman law, a man standing for election was permitted to offer a cash gift to every member of his tribe. In Roman eyes, this did not constitute a bribe. Rather, it was regarded simply as ‘munificence’, and displays of such generosity guaranteed a person popular acclaim in Rome. By contrast, what Romans found truly distasteful was excessive private luxury, and so Caesar was careful to make it clear that the vast sums of money he borrowed were for the benefit of the Roman people rather than his own pleasure.