The Classical World (51 page)

The laws which he then executed were detailed and not always extreme, but the most important of them were resoundingly traditionalist. Freedom and justice were at the heart of them. In the interests of justice, Sulla did increase the number of standing jury-courts, adding at least seven more, but he did away with Gaius Gracchus’ ‘equal liberty’ by handing the juries back to senators only. He increased the number of senators from 300 to 600 (the increase was made up from his supporters), but he also regulated the lower ranks of a man’s career towards the consulship: the likes of a Marius, rising directly to the top job, would now be illegal. The censors’ powers to choose senators were also checked: anyone who held a junior magistracy, a quaestorship, would now automatically become a senator.

Above all, Sulla settled his veteran soldiers, so loyal in his years of rebellion, on plots of land confiscated in Italy; the sites of Fiesole and Pompeii were among those settled with new Sullan colonies. And, wonder of wonders, he neutered the populists’ weapon, the tribunate, which had been turned against his own original command in Asia. He ruled that tribunes could not go on to hold other prestigious magistracies; ambitious men would therefore avoid the position. He even took away the tribunes’ power to veto (and probably, propose) legislation in the people’s assemblies. Arguably, he did not also give the Senate the formal right to vet all proposed laws in advance. But even so, his was a stunning political reaction.

Sulla’s lesser reforms were neither extreme nor ill-considered. He passed laws which limited the freedom of commanders outside Italy, and these persisted for decades. So did his establishment of a civil court to hear cases of ‘injury’, which was defined as assault or violent entry into private property. By these courts, the minimal framework of justice in the old Twelve Tables was filled out. Sulla had thought carefully about details which were ill-organized. Having turned the populist clock back, he then gave up his powers as dictator and in 80, unexpectedly took up the consulship instead. He had realized a conservative vision, as if the likes of Gaius Gracchus had never existed. Having done so, he retired, whereupon he died in 79 of disease, leaving his ‘restoration’ to be immediately contested. His funeral was a public one, the first known for a Roman citizen: a vast procession accompanied his body to the Forum where an orator spoke out on Sulla’s deeds. Actors wore the family’s masks; 2,000 crowns of gold were said to have been donated; his statue was carved from the precious wood of a spice tree.
⁶
Some thirty years later this funeral would be excelled for the next dictator, Sulla’s only superior.

Sulla, the dissolute young man, had ended by legislating against disruptive luxury. What mattered more, though, was his stunning example: an outright defence of his own ‘dignity’, backed by veteran soldiers loyal to him and a long list of killings of enemies and confiscations of their property in Italy. From this short sharp revolution, whole fortunes changed hands, often passing to Sulla’s decidedly unsavoury agents. Sulla himself stressed his personal favour from the gods (especially Venus, whom he encountered in the town, as yet little
known, of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor). He had also been told by an eastern prophet that he would achieve greatness and die at the height of his good fortune. The prophecy was one more reason why, mission accomplished, this bloodstained dictator resigned and let the ‘good men’ in the Senate get on with what he had put back into their hands.

Pompey’s Triumphs

Gnaeus Pompeius Imperator, having ended thirty years of war, defeated, killed or subjected 12,183,000 men, sunk or captured 846 ships, brought under Roman protection 1,538 towns and fortified settlements and subjected the lands from the Sea of Azov to the Red Sea, fulfilled his vow to the goddess Minerva according to his merit
.

Pompey’s inscription on his temple to Minerva,
vowed in September 62
BC

Sulla’s reaction was not exactly based on consensus. However, it took ten years of impassioned political dispute before its most controversial elements were dismantled. Those disputes, as always, took place in open air in the Roman Forum, supported by the space for elections, the ‘Campus Martius’, outside the formal ‘boundary’ of the city. The Forum was less than a square half-mile of ground and it had already seen seething political turmoil, but the next thirty years would bring contests whose highlights were more dramatic than those on any comparable political playing field in the world. If the statues of wise Pythagoras and brave Alcibiades still looked down on the space for Romans’ public assemblies, it was the spirit of Alcibiades, the treacherous but charming Athenian aristocrat, which was most in tune with events.

Throughout the 70s the senators did not make distinguished use of the liberty which Sulla had handed to them. Sulla’s senators, after all, were mostly his own appointments, whereas previous senators, the most traditionalist ones, had been killed off by him as his opponents.
If he hoped that the many members of his enlarged Senate would be honest judges of the few senatorial commanders, because they themselves would never win such high office, he was mistaken. Allegations of corruption and collusion proliferated. He had given back too much to men unworthy of administering it: there was also his own bad example of force, violence and a march on Rome. But already by the 70s the Republic had survived so much that to those in the Forum at the time, whose views we must represent, its death was not at all inevitable.

Not that the turmoil was confined to Rome and the Forum. In Italy, Sulla’s land-grants to his veteran soldiers were promptly contested by existing landowners and neighbours. Those ex-soldiers who settled on their small plots did not always find farming to their taste or ability, even if they had been recruited originally from rural life: they, too, began to take on debts (Cicero blamed their ‘luxury’). In 77, with Sulla only dead for a year, the ex-consul Aemilius Lepidus marched south with troops against Rome when the senators tried to summon him back from his large provincial command. Lepidus had combined commands in bits of Gaul on either side of the Alps, a precedent on which Julius Caesar’s career would later thrive so dangerously. But Lepidus’ troops were not so effective.

Out in Spain, meanwhile, a former supporter of Marius, the talented knight Sertorius, maintained an open rebellion against the Sullan supremacy. He had his own alternative senate and a readiness to recruit able Spanish talent and encourage them to learn Latin and Roman ways. Opponents of the Sullan supremacy in Rome could now escape to the West. When Sertorius’ hold was eventually broken in 73, his Roman conqueror Pompey tactfully burned Sertorius’ letters from important people in Rome without (so he said) even reading them.

Born in September 106, Pompey was only in his thirties but self-evidently a military man to be reckoned with. His background was not altogether encouraging. His father, Pompeius Strabo, had held the consulship in 89
BC
and had fought fiercely against Italian rebels in the north during the Social War. But his career was then marred by duplicity and a strong suspicion that he had tried to collude with the rebel leader, Cinna, whom he was supposed to be fighting. He died of disease, but his body was thrown into the mud during his funeral: he
was also accused of a ferocious greed for money. His son, Pompey, was to learn his lessons early: the need for financial backing and for popularity, but also the scope for dissimulation and the unprincipled use of troops who would become their leader’s own personal army.

As yet, Pompey’s pre-eminence lay in the future. It was much more worrying that in 73, back in Italy, seventy-four slave-gladiators escaped from their barracks at Capua and started by making a stand on the nearby slopes of Mount Vesuvius near Naples. Their leader was Spartacus, a Thracian who had previously fought in the Roman army. Before long he had attracted more than 70,000 slaves and herdsmen from southern Italy. Spartacus was a real hero, big, brave and great-hearted. His followers’ aim was not to attack slavery (before long, they took on slaves themselves) but to free themselves, preferably after heavy plundering. In 72 Spartacus’ men defeated both Roman consuls, but in the next year their terrifying revolt (perhaps now 150,000 strong) was put down by no fewer than ten legions. It reflected on the poor rural conditions and the extensive slave-labour which was current in much of south Italy, intensified by ‘Hannibal’s legacy’. And in the same year as Spartacus, King Mithridates was at war again in Asia. He had been provoked by the Romans’ acquisition of the nearby kingdom of Bithynia in Asia Minor. It would be ten years before he too was finally beaten.

Rural discontent, an ex-consul marching on Rome with an army, a huge slave war and these big wars in Spain and Asia (Sertorius and Mithridates even linked up briefly): nonetheless, the senatorial supremacy survived. Not until 75 was any of the political neutering of the tribunate reversed and not until 70 were its final elements removed by law. Ten years is a long time, and yet the total male citizenry was increasing hugely meanwhile, swollen by the recently enfranchised Italians. Some 910,000 adult citizen-males were registered in the census of 69, about three times as many as in the 130s. The composition of the citizenry had also changed markedly. Even in Rome, very few of the citizens had any ancestral link with Roman voters of the fourth or third centuries
BC
; outside Rome, they now had none. The new citizens were distributed between the river Po in the north and the toe of Italy in the south, and, in principle, every single one of these adult males had a vote in the assemblies at Rome,
whether or not they owned any property.
¹
If the lower-class majority of this huge Italy-wide ‘electorate’ had asserted itself at Rome, or if even the urban part of it had rioted in unison in the city, surely those populist symbols, the tribunes, would have been restored much sooner?

The answer is that very few, if any, of the lower classes throughout Italy ever voted or visited at all. Distance deterred many of them, hundreds of miles away from Rome, and the wondrous voting-system neutered the rest of them. Those at hand in the city were clustered into only four of what were now the thirty-five ‘tribes’ in the assembly which passed the laws. A majority among the tribes decided a motion, and it was still the block-vote within each tribe which decided its overall vote. Seldom, if ever, would all ‘tribes’ vote, and a majority of the total votes cast still decided nothing (the ‘block-vote’ system stopped a pure majority of votes from being decisive). In the thirty-one other ‘rustic’ tribes, the voters present in Rome would tend to be the good men and true of the local propertied classes, although we are unsure quite how many poor rustic Italians might also have migrated into Rome and tried to subsist there. Above all, there was the context of such assemblies: they had no prearranged calendar throughout the year; only a magistrate could put a proposal; as always nobody in the audiences could speak, or propose an alternative.

We do hear of harangues at public meetings other than assemblies, great speeches to crowds in the Forum, public notices, pictures, even, to influence opinion: but who were this ‘people’ or ‘crowd’? In the city, so many freedmen were still heavily obliged to their patrons. Small shopkeepers and the entire service-industry depended on the magnificence of their superiors; clients and hangers-on would go by arrangement to a great man’s household in the early mornings to pay their respects (and probably be told to turn up if he or a friend was going to harangue ‘the people’ from a vantage point in the Forum that day). Any lower-class immigrants from Italy would be part of this layer of social dependence. Proposed legislation was posted weeks in advance, giving time for opponents and supporters to contact like-minded men of influence in and outside the city and mobilize enough of them in enough of the thirty-one ‘rustic’ voting tribes. There was ample time, too, for ‘canvassing’ and for its counterpart, organized
bribery, to suit the rich.
²
Humble voters went along with it and expected their betters to give them presents in return for ‘correct’ voting. In 70 we first find the relevant officers, the ‘distributors’ (
divisores
), in action before an electoral assemblymeeting even took place. They were now coming to the houses of individual candidates in order to receive the loot in advance. It was to be distributed before the electoral meeting and before just enough voting, but no more, took place.

This context does not mean that political life was all fixed in one direction, harmoniously agreed by the upper class, Within that class there were the clear alternative political approaches, ‘populist’ or ‘traditionalist’, to which important men remained true and constant over time. They became known for them, even though they did not acquire or maintain them in organized political ‘parties’. Nor were most of the elections and legislation prearranged by a few powerful families on simple family or factional lines. Oratory and its impact really mattered before potential voters, as did a speaker’s popular ‘esteem’: there was an important interplay between the political leaders and the local crowds in the Forum before whom they performed. But money and ‘generosity’ mattered more. Sulla’s rules on office-holding had intensified competition by those lower down on the ladder for what were still the very few top jobs, and as a result there was an even greater pressure on the keen careerists: twenty candidates competed yearly for only eight praetorships, the next step on the way up. In the race for office, they had to borrow huge sums (usually from fellow politicians) so as to make a grand show at an early stage. It helped them if they bought a fine house, preferably on the Palatine hill or the Sacred Way within a few hundred yards of the Forum’s centre, and standards expected of such houses had soared since the 140s. The next hope was to be appointed to a juicy province, squeeze it and repay the debts. Abroad, a man could win military honour and return to a magnificent public triumph, with a celebratory banquet and games to follow, financed by the provincials’ losses. The shows and feasting would increase his following and he would hope for the highest honour of a consulship and then another even greater command. The expenses were becoming far higher, the risks ever greater, but the roars of applause and the intoxication of being seen
to be so great were the very lifeblood of aspiring great men. The ideal great man would combine military skill with oratory and money: if not, orators would have to be bribed to speak for him, and the money borrowed.