The Classical World (52 page)

In Sulla’s aftermath, therefore, liberty, justice and luxury were never more vigorously invoked and contested. Speakers, whether populist or not, could appeal to the liberties of the distant past to support their arguments, and in 73 one of the tribunes was Macer, himself a historian. A later version of a speech by him probably reflects his line of argument.
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Wanting to restore the tribunes’ powers, he gave a stirring call to ‘liberty’. Sulla’s settlement, he insisted, was really ‘wicked slavery’; the people should not be fobbed off by the token distributions of grain, recently reintroduced (at a low price, admittedly, but probably for only about 40,000 free citizens, a fraction of Rome’s current total). The wars of noble senators, Macer insisted, depended on the people as soldiers: let the senators fight alone, in Spain or Asia, with only the masks of their former ancestors to help them. But Macer’s speech also complained of the people’s apathy. Outside public meetings, they seemed to forget about ‘liberty’. That fact, too, is relevant; democratic Athenians, by contrast, did not forget. And despite Macer, the plebs continued to fight as soldiers. For many, it was a better life than struggling on as a small farmer in Italy, risking slavery for debt to a canny rich neighbour.

As for justice, the senators made a fine abuse of the monopoly of the jury-courts. Without the check of non-senatorial jurors, corruption became even more prevalent: Sulla had promoted new men to be senators and they were even more prone to bribery, as they needed funds for the vast expense of being in the senatorial order. Both in Rome and in the provinces, magistrates exempted themselves or their friends from the very rules which they enunciated in their ‘edicts’. Senatorial governors were blatantly extortionate and in general they could be ‘shamefully’ luxurious. As ‘chief priest’ in 70
BC
, the noble Metellus gave an amazing dinner of three courses, with ten dishes each, including seven rare types of seafood and ‘sow’s udders’ (banned by law). The famous orator Hortensius was attacked for dining on roast peacocks and watering his plane trees with wine.
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The able general Lucullus had such an extravagant villa that a picture of it was
displayed to the people when his enemies were trying to get him replaced in his command. In due course, Lucullus even introduced the cherry tree from Asia and his ‘gardens’ (more of a park) became the envy of fellow Romans.
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Both men were accused of the ultimate extravagance, maintaining exotic fishponds.

This private luxury was particularly controversial at a time when the few subsidized corn-distributions were not adequate to meet the poor’s needs and the price and availability of grain was being squeezed by pirates in the Mediterranean. Nor was the charge of ‘luxury’ simply a slogan. After the restoration of the tribunes’ power in 70 no less than sixty-four senators were expelled as ‘unworthy’ from the Senate by the newly approved censors. Sulla’s purges had left too much room for these second-raters, but would even better men have held out against the temptations of a decade of senatorial ‘liberty’? In late 69
BC
extravagance was limited by law once again. The slogans of the moment were clean provincial government, no favouritism by magistrates and a restrained private life. They were reactions exploited by the rival ‘populist’ politicians.

In the year 70
BC
the last of the tribunes’ former powers were restored by a notable pair of consuls. One of them, Crassus, was of noble family but had already made himself extremely rich, no doubt by profiteering during Sulla’s confiscations. He was also distinguished by military commands, not least against Spartacus: it was he who had ‘decimated’ his own reluctant troops (executing one man in ten) and had then crucified 6,000 of the slave-rebels along the main road back to Rome. For the purposes of a consulship, he had managed to suspend his dislike of his colleague, the emergent Pompey. It was very intense. At the end of the Spartacus War, Pompey had returned to Italy and helped to defeat some of the slave-fugitives. Nonetheless, it was he, not Crassus, who was voted the full glory of a triumph, partly because of his victories elsewhere on Rome’s behalf. Crassus had had to make do with a mere ovation. In the 50s the two of them would be thrown together again by their respective needs, but their personal relations were never easy. For the moment, Crassus marked his successes by giving a tremendous series of feasts for the people.

Nonetheless, the star was Pompey, who added two weeks of games to the celebrations. He had already been voted one triumph (in his
mid-twenties) and yet, amazingly, he was still not even a senator: he was the son of a respected consul, but personally he had remained a knight. When about to take up his consulship, he had had to have a little book on senatorial procedure written for him by the scholarly Varro. It was not that he was wholly uneducated. He knew Greek; he had an interest in Latin vocabulary and grammar; he would later respect a great Greek scholar by having his symbols of office lowered in the learned man’s presence; he once freed a slave without any payment because of the man’s intelligence. But he was not very bright. Pompey was married five times in his life; one of them was for a political marriage, made with a woman who was already pregnant by another man. But he only divorced twice: his last young wife was dear to him, the remarkable Cornelia, who studied mathematics and philosophy and ranks as one of the late Republic’s educated upper-class young ladies. Pompey was also remembered fondly by his former mistress, a courtesan called Flora: she said that he had never made love with her without sinking his teeth into her and leaving toothmarks.
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Outside the bedroom, Pompey’s supreme skill was military command. He had brought privately raised troops to help Sulla, but his brutality against his fellow Romans was to be vividly recalled more than twenty years later as the acts of a ‘teenage hangman’.
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He had then been made into a commander against Sulla’s enemies in Sicily and north Africa. It was in Africa that his troops had acclaimed him (in his mid-twenties) as ‘Great’. With his open, boyish looks and brushed-back hair, young Pompey did have a look of the real ‘great’ Alexander, though it is only visible to his fans. When Sulla died in early 78, Pompey at first supported Lepidus’ renewed populism, but he won even more fame by helping to defeat Lepidus when he marched on Rome. Then Pompey left for Spain in order to defeat Sertorius too. It took him six years of hard fighting and he commemorated it with a trophy in the Pyrenees, topped by his own statue and inscribed to say that he had conquered no less than 876 cities. The result was a second triumph, on 29 December 71, the consulship for 70 and popularity in that year for restoring the tribunes’ powers. Aged thirty-six, Pompey had already veered artfully from one political line to another, while proving to be Rome’s supreme general of the moment.

His consulship was not followed by a provincial command. He
remained in Rome, but in due course he was voted two controversial commands by legislation taken to the people. The first, in 67
BC
, was against the Mediterranean pirates, for which he received a massive fleet and powers equal to the provincial governors: he polished off the job in only three months, greatly to the people’s gratitude. Meanwhile, the traditional senators’ choice, Lucullus, was failing to finish off the war in Asia against Mithridates. Lucullus had shown diplomatic skill and had even penetrated Armenia, but enemies of his ‘traditional’ style emphasized his scandalous luxury and his slow progress and had Pompey sent out to replace him: he was ‘sent down from heaven’, Cicero even said.
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The war took Pompey, too, four years, and even then King Mithridates had to kill himself (his famous book on cures for poisons was translated into Latin on Pompey’s orders). As the war had spread through connected kings in Asia, Pompey went on south to win victories in Syria, the Lebanon and, in 63
BC
, in Judaea. There, the leaders of the Jews were split between two rival candidates for the High Priesthood; first one, then the other invited Pompey to help them, and eventually he settled down to besiege the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He then entered the Holy of Holies of the Temple itself, a shocking profanation in Jewish eyes. The Jews’ territories were reduced, taxed and brought, decisively, under Roman control.

In Asia, Pompey showed a shrewd eye for durable diplomacy and for workable local kingdoms.
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His conquests of the mid-60s mark the beginning of the ‘Roman Near East’ and once again transformed the Romans’ public finances. Tribute received from abroad was nearly doubled and the booty and chances for investment were enormous. But Egypt remained for the taking, complex, alien but uniquely rich in grain and gold. It would haunt the next thirty-five years.

Two triumphs before the age of forty were bad enough for envious contemporaries. At the first one, Pompey was said to have tried to drive a chariot pulled by elephants through the city gate, only to find that the gate was too narrow.
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A third triumph, at the expense of the respected Lucullus, would be alarming and intolerable. It was a cardinal tradition of the Republic that no one man should dominate it, and the traditionalist senators were duly mobilized against the returning Pompey. In January 62 a proposal made in his absence to appoint
him to settle unrest in Italywas stopped only when the leading young ‘traditionalist’, Cato, vetoed it as tribune. Armed soldiers had been brought to see the bill through, but a fellow tribune put his hand over the mouth of the proposer and refused to allow him to finish speaking when he tried to recite his proposal before the assembly by heart. Yet this Cato was the young man so renowned for his integrity and entrenched conservative principles: generally, said Cicero, he behaved as if he was living in ‘the ideal republic of Plato, not the cesspit of Romulus’.
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Cato was the great-grandson of stern old Cato the Elder, but he too could play in the dirt when his Republic was threatened. Nonetheless, Pompey was voted days of grateful supplication, a gold crown to wear in the public circus and, in due course, a triumph.

The hero’s actual return from the East was less happy. He divorced his wife (his third) for adultery but failed to fix a marriage alliance into the heart of the senatorial establishment: young Cato was adamant that he should be kept out. Pompey’s lack of talent as a speaker showed up at public meetings. Other more local business was the talk of Rome and meanwhile, the senators kept this impossible superstar at a distance. With hindsight, they should surely have accommodated him and learned to live with his glory as it faded. The trouble was that it was impossibly glorious. In September 61 Pompey did at last hold his Eastern triumph, his third. It was a show like none before it. Conquered kings and spoils processed before the crowds, including a former ‘High Priest’ from Jerusalem. There was even a lynx on show, and some baboons. On the second day, Pompey entered in his jewel-covered chariot with one of his sons beside him: people alleged malevolently that he was wearing the purple cloak of Alexander himself. He made his entrance on his birthday and he displayed a symbol of the world, a globe: he had now triumphed over three separate continents, Africa (79), Spain (71) and Asia (61). Coins continued to proclaim this global message.
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Still on the defensive, the ‘traditional’ senators refused to ratify the settlements which Pompey had personally made in the East. A year after the triumph, he was being accused of really wanting to wear a royal diadem, as was proved by the white diadem of a bandage which he was wearing on his leg. In fact, the bandage was for a leg-ulcer.
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Two years on, the ‘traditional’ senators were still keeping his veteran
soldiers waiting to be settled on plots of land as their reward. They feared Pompey, but what exactly would this outsider now want? He had peaked so early, and yet for another nine years the senators, stiffened by Cato, would fail to repair their deliberate distance from him. Meanwhile Pompey would seek helpful friends of his own. Pompey, contemporaries concluded, ‘was apt to say one thing, and think another’. He was more ‘a fox than a lion’ in the political jungle. ‘He is apt to say one thing and think another,’ wrote the acute young Caelius to Cicero, ‘but he is usually not clever enough to stop his real aims from showing.’
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The World of Cicero

Suppose I manage to make even Caesar who is riding on the crest of the wave just now a better citizen, am I harming the state so very much? Why, even if I had no ill-wishers, even if I had everyone’s goodwill (as I ought to have), there would still be as much to be said for healing unsound bits of the body politic as for amputating them. But look at the facts: the Senate has been deserted by the knights… our leading men think they are touching heaven with their finger tips if the bearded mullets in their fishponds are feeding out of their hands, and they neglect everything else. Don’t I seem to you to be doing enough of a service if I contrive that those who have the power to do harm do not wish to do so?

Cicero,
Letters to Atticus
2.1 (
c
. 3 June 60
BC
)

Like Pompey, Marcus Tullius Cicero was a novelty on Rome’s political scene. So far from triumphing while a non-senator, he had no senators or Roman magistrates in his family and warfare was not exactly his talent. He was born (like Marius, oddly) at Arpinum, a hill-town about eighty miles south-east of Rome in the same year as Pompey, 106
BC
. He was a ‘new man’, with family roots in the local gentry but without a funerary mask worth dwelling on in his family’s halls. Yet he has been described byan admiring modern scholar, as ‘perhaps the most civilized man who has ever lived’.
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Nowadays, Cicero is better known for his vanity and self-obsession, his poor political judgement and his way of referring to the mass of Roman citizens as ‘dregs’ or ‘cattle’, to life in the provinces as
‘insufferable tedium’ and to the Greeks of his era as shifty and lightweight. But there is far more to him than these quick stereotypes: he is the Roman whom we really feel we know in these turbulent years.