Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (12 page)

After about 494 BC, when the plebs—that is, the ordinary, nonaristocratic citizens of Rome—had brought the city to a standstill by withholding their labor, a new institution came into being to defend their rights. These were the tribunes of the people, charged with protecting the lives and property of plebeians. Tribunes could veto any election, law, or decree of the Senate, of which they were ex officio members, as well as the acts of all other officials (except a dictator). They could also veto one another’s vetoes. They did not have executive authority; their function was essentially
negative. Controlling appointments to the office of tribune later became very important to generals like Julius Caesar, who based their power on the armies plus the support of the populares against the aristocrats.

The system worked well enough and afforded extraordinary freedoms to the citizens of Rome so long as all members of the Senate recognized that compromise and consensus were the only ways to get anything done. Everitt poses the issue in terms of the different perspectives of Cicero and Caesar; Cicero was the most intellectual defender of the Roman constitution whereas Caesar was Rome’s, and perhaps history’s, greatest general. Both were former consuls: “Cicero’s weakness as a politician was that his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. He failed to understand the reasons for the crisis that tore apart the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar, the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero, it lay in finding better men to run the government—and better laws to keep them in order.”
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Imperialism provoked the crisis that destroyed the Roman Republic. After slowly consolidating its power over all of Italy and conquering the Greek colonies on the island of Sicily, the republic extended its conquests to Carthage in North Africa, to Greece itself, and to what is today southern France, Spain, and Asia Minor. By the first century BC, Rome dominated all of Gaul, most of Iberia, the coast of North Africa, Macedonia (including Greece), the Balkans, and large parts of modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. “The republic became enormously rich on the spoils of empire,” Everitt writes, “so much so that from 167 BC Roman citizens in Italy no longer paid any personal taxes.”
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The republic also became increasingly self-important and arrogant, believing that its task was to bring civilization to lesser peoples and naming the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum (our sea), somewhat the way some Americans in the twentieth century came to refer to the Pacific Ocean as an “American lake.”

The problem was that the Roman constitution made administration of so large and diverse an area increasingly difficult and subtly altered the norms and interests that underlay the need for compromise and consensus. Rome was the first case of what today we call imperial overstretch. There were several aspects to this crisis, but the most significant was the
transformation of the Roman army into a professional military force and the growth of militarism. Well into the middle years of the republic, the Roman legions were a true citizen army, composed of conscripted small landowners. Unlike in the American republic, male citizens between the ages of seventeen and forty-six, except slaves and freedmen, were liable to be called for military service. One of the more admirable aspects of the Roman system was that only those citizens who possessed a specified amount of property (namely, a horse and some land) could serve, thereby making those who had profited most from the state also responsible for its defense. The Roman plebs, being nonlandowners, did their service as skirmishers for the army, or in the navy, which had far less honor attached to it. At the beginning of each term, the consuls appointed tribunes to raise two legions—a legion never much exceeded six thousand men—from the census roll of eligible citizens.

“Among the Romans,” writes Holland, “it was received wisdom that ‘men who have their roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers.’ . . . For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their plows left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years.”
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Traditionally, when a campaign was over, the troops were promptly sent back to their farms, sometimes richer and flushed with military glory. Occasionally, the returning farmers got to march behind their general in a “triumph,” the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar and a victory procession permitted only to the greatest of conquerors. The general himself, who paid for this parade, rode in a chariot, his face covered in red lead to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A boy slave stood behind him holding a laurel wreath above his head while whispering in his ear, “Remember that you are mortal.” In Pompey’s great triumph of 61 BC, after he swept the seas of pirates and conquered Asia Minor, he actually wore a cloak that had belonged to Alexander the Great. Behind the conqueror came his prisoners in chains and finally the legionnaires, who by ancient tradition sang obscene songs satirizing their general.
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Suetonius has recorded for history one of the ribald verses Caesar’s soldiers sang
during his Gallic Triumph, which is also evidence of Caesar’s numerous affairs with women:

Home we bring our bald whoremonger;
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay.
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By the end of the second century BC, in Everitt’s words, “The responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were required, with soldiers on long-term contracts.”
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The great general Caius Marius (c. 157-86 BC) undertook to reform the armed forces, replacing the old conscript armies with a professional body of career volunteers. Senator Robert Byrd explains: “Whereas the ownership of property had long been a requirement for entry into military service, Marius opened the door of recruitment to all, enrolling men who owned no property and were previously exempt. In accepting such troops, he remedied the long-standing manpower shortage and opened up a career for the employment of thousands of landless and jobless citizens. By this innovation, Marius created a new type of client army, bound to its commander as its patron.... Marius, in creating a professional army, had created a new base of power for ambitious men to exploit and use as an instrument of despotic authority.”
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Members of this large standing army, equipped by the Roman state, signed up for twenty to twenty-five years. Wlien their contracts expired, they expected their commanders, to whom they were personally loyal, to provide them with farms, which Marius had promised them. “From that moment on,” writes Holland, “possession of a farm was no longer the qualification for military service but the reward.”
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Unfortunately, land in Italy was by then in short supply, much of it tied up in huge sheep and cattle ranches owned by rich, often aristocratic, families and run by slave labor. The landowners were the dominant conservative influence in the Senate, and they resisted all efforts at land reform. Members of the upper classes had become wealthy as a result of Rome’s wars of conquest and bought more land as the only safe investment, driving small holders off
their properties. In 133 BC, the gentry arranged for the killing of the tribune Tiberius Gracchus (of plebeian origin) for advocating a new land-use law. Rome’s population thus continued to swell with landless veterans. “Where would the land be found,” asks Everitt, “for the superannuated soldiers of Rome’s next war?”
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Although the state owned a large amount of public property that theoretically could have been distributed to veterans, most of it had been illegally expropriated by aristocrats. Marius, who from the beginning allied himself with the populares in the Senate, was willing to seize land for military purposes, but this inevitably meant a direct clash with the established order. “Cicero detested Roman militarism,”and Marius was exactly the kind of leader he believed was leading Rome to ruin.
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Utterly ruthless and caring little for the Roman constitution, Marius served as consul an unprecedented seven times, in clear violation of the requirement that there be an interval of ten years between each re-election. Suzanne Cross, an American scholar of classical antiquity, describes him as harsh and vengeful.
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Marius was the first Roman general to portray himself as “the soldier’s friend.” Marius’s nephew, Julius Caesar, built on this framework, and Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, who became Augustus Caesar, completed the transformation of the republic from a democracy into a military dictatorship.

During the final century before its fall, the republic was assailed by many revolts of generals and their troops, leading to gross violations of constitutional principles and on several occasions civil wars. Julius Caesar, who became consul for the first time in 59 BC, enjoyed great popularity with the ordinary people. After his year in office, he was rewarded by being named governor of Gaul, a post he held between 58 and 49, during which he both earned military glory and became immensely wealthy. In 49 he famously allowed his armies to cross the Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy that served as a boundary against armies approaching the capital, and plunged the country into civil war. Taking on his former ally and now rival, Pompey, he won, after which, as Everitt observes, “No one was left in the field for Caesar to fight.... His leading opponents were dead. The republic was dead too: he had become the state.”
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Julius Caesar exercised dictatorship from 48 to 44, and a month before the Ides of March he arranged to have himself named “dictator for life.” Instead, he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a conspiracy of eight members, led
by Brutus and Cassius, both praetors, known to history as “principled tyrannicides.”

Shakespeare’s re-creation of the scenes that followed, based upon Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch from the French edition of 1559, has become as immortal as the deed itself. In Shakespeare’s version of a speech to the plebeians in the Forum, Brutus famously defended his actions: “If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and all die slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?” However, Mark Antony, Caesar’s chief lieutenant, speaking to the same audience, had the last word, and turned the populace against Brutus and Cassius. He sent the crowd racing forth to avenge Caesar’s murder, as Shakespeare has him cynically say, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grandnephew, formed an alliance to avenge the murder of Caesar. It would end with only one man standing, and that man, Caius Octavianus (Octavian), would decisively change Roman government by replacing the republic with an imperial dictatorship. Everitt characterizes Octavian as “a freebooting young privateer,” who on August 19,43 BC (just over a year after Caesar’s death), became the youngest consul in Rome’s history and set out, in violation of the constitution, to raise his own private army. Holland calls him an “adventurer and terrorist,” while Parenti, quoting Gibbon, says he was a “subtle tyrant,” who “crafted an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth.” Byrd laments, “There was absolute freedom of speech in the Roman Senate until the time of Augustus [Octavian],” who put limits on how far senators could go. “The boy,” says Everitt, “would be a focus for the simmering resentments among the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans, and the standing legions.”
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Cicero, who had devoted his life to trying to curb the kind of power represented by Octavian, now gave up on the rule of law in favor of realpolitik. He recognized that “for all his struggles the constitution was dead and power lay in the hands of soldiers and their leaders.” In Cicero’s view, the only hope was to try to co-opt Octavian, leading him toward a more constitutional position, while doing everything not to “irritate
rank-and-file opinion, which was fundamentally Caesarian.” Cicero would pay with his life for this last, desperate gamble. Octavian, still allied with Mark Antony, ordered at least 130 senators (perhaps as many as 300) executed and their property confiscated after charging them with having supported the conspiracy against Caesar. Mark Antony personally added Cicero’s name to the list. When he met his death, the great scholar, orator, and Grecophile had with him a copy of Euripides’
Medea,
which he had been reading. His head and both hands were displayed in the Forum.
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A year after Cicero’s death, following the battle of Philippi, where Brutus and Cassius were defeated and committed suicide, Octavian and Antony divided the known world between them. Octavian took the West and remained in Rome; Antony accepted the East and allied himself with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt and Julius Caesar’s former mistress. In 31 BC, Octavian set out to end this unstable arrangement, and at the sea battle of Actium in the Gulf of Ambracia on the western coast of Greece, he defeated Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet. The following year in Alexandria, Mark Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra took an asp to her breast. By then, both had been thoroughly discredited for claiming that Antony was a descendant of Caesar’s and for seeking Roman citizenship rights for Cleopatra’s children by Caesar. Octavian would rule the Roman world for the next forty-five years, until his death in 14 AD.