The Classical World (57 page)

We must remember Cicero’s comment: what Romans disliked was private luxury, whereas public display was munificence, and not disagreeable. It was, then, alarming to political rivals, but highly popular, when Pompey paid for a spectacular theatre in 55
BC
, including a statue of himself and fourteen nations which he had conquered. Grander, even, than Scaurus’ theatre three years earlier, it led up to at least four temples (including one to Victorious Venus). At its dedication, elephants and 500 lions were staged in a beastly‘hunt’. In 53 a future tribune, Curio, put up not one wooden theatre but two, built as a pair which could turn back to back, or revolve into one and become a single arena for gladiators. These luxurious displays were public, at least. What was attackable, by contrast, was the ‘selfish’ luxury of marble-pillared houses (the huge pillars of dark-red marble in Scaurus’ hall were notorious) and when he took back the fantastic-ally rich decoration of his theatre to adorn his own Tuscan villa, the slaves at the property are said to have set fire to it in protest at his extravagance.
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To us, urban poverty and suffering at Rome seem much more relevant problems. The scarcity of food and water, the appalling housing for Rome’s masses were an intolerable negligence. Yet unlike the poor in many Greek cities in the age of Plato, Rome’s poor did not unite and rebel for a new constitution. Poor people rioted, certainly, for Clodius, but they were rioting for a great benefactor, now lost to them. In the process the Senate house burned down, but only byaccident, and there was no programme to abolish the Senate itself.
There was no popular campaigning with a new ideology. One reason was that so many of the ‘plebs’ were still freed persons, dependent on their former masters; others were foreigners; by contrast, a hard core of Roman ‘city-folk’, persisting across the generations, was always much scarcer. The upper class spent lavishly in the city, and it was their spending which sustained the mass of shopkeepers and builders and even the specialists in the dreaded luxuries. Many of the plebs therefore needed the rich, and as none of them could stand up and speak in their assemblies or at political meetings, and few ever voted (and then in blocks), the ‘popular’ potential of the Roman constitution was wonderfully contained. At Athens, when democracywas adopted, the members of the Athenians’ supreme ‘senate’ had been discredited by their collaboration with the previous tyranny; the exiling of other nobles by those tyrants had already taught lesser people that they could cope well enough without an aristocrat to help them along. At Rome, no such crisis had discredited the senators. Above all, in Attica the citizenry had been so much smaller; it was linked by supposed ‘kinship’, and was much more cohesive than the Roman citizenry now up and down Italy.

In the Italian countryside, the plight of the poor was certainly no better than in Rome, yet here too there were no ‘peasants’ revolts’ in the 50s. Rather, more and more of the poor were being recruited, or forced, into the army for a long service abroad. Soldiers’ wages, though meagre, did at least exist: the problem was that, once in the army, soldiers looked to their generals, not to any ‘republican’ values. What had ‘the Republic’ ever done for them anyway? Here, indeed, was a cause of crisis. It was not that Rome needed monarchyor ‘stable government’ in the late 50s because the scale of her empire had grown so big. Instead, tensions arose from the very conquests by which much of this empire was still being won. Generals rewarded their soldiers with spoils from their victories abroad and then won credit by proposals to settle them on plots of land and reward them on their return to Italy. The same generals fought on with the prolonged commands which were now being obtained by ignoring the Senate and going directly to the popular assemblies for an enabling law. A friendly tribune would then veto the proposals to recall an important general in subsequent years. The old two-headed monster, as the Roman
constitution had evolved, found the limbs (the people) being used to cow what had once represented itself as the nourishing, sensible stomach (the Senate). If Polybius had lived to see it, he would have considered it proof of his theory: ‘oligarchy’, as morals changed, would decline into ‘democracy’ and then into ‘monarchy’. But the ‘democracy’ was really no such thing.

The more the generals conquered, the more their riches grew, enabling them to paymore to their troops from their own gains. They could also payback the massive loans through which theyhad bought their way to a command in the first place. In reply, senators should have increased the soldiers’ pay from state funds and somehow paid publicly for their land-settlements. But even then, the sums needed would have been huge, and would have required much more than a new inheritance tax which, understandably, the rich detested.

The ‘liberty’ of legislation by the ‘people’ (few of whom actually voted) was thus manipulated to curb the ‘liberty’ of senators to do, and eventually say, whatever they wanted. But personal dignity, rank and esteem also exacerbated the problem. Once Pompey had set such a dazzling new standard after his conquests in Asia, his rivals could not regard themselves as his equal or superior unless they shone even more brightly. The values of their ancestors and the entire training of their careers encouraged them to compete with Pompey’s new lustre. In Caesar’s case, this ‘dignity’ was driving him to bring about the deaths of a million people in his Gallic provinces and to amass an increasingly incredible fortune. When Caesar returned to Rome he would not only be a consul. He would be able to triumph with the most astounding displays of gold, silver and booty. His debts would no longer be a problem. After plundering Gaul on an enormous scale he himself would be able to bribe and lend to people of influence at Rome, and eventuallyhe would ‘benefit’ the entire city plebs. Although the plebs would never dismantle the republican system by themselves, theyhad acute discontents, and the man who gave all of them benefits would be almost unopposable. Meanwhile Caesar’s soldiers were becoming hardened experts in warfare thanks to their years of practice at the Gauls’ expense. He himself could paythem, and he would duly provide for them. If he won the consulship again, what might he not do for the urban plebs and for his troops, now his men of ten years’
standing? Would he ever laythe office down? Opposition to one-man rule was the very lifeblood of republican values, and senators had certainly not become indifferent to it.

Despite the moralists’ complaints, the gangs in the streets of Rome, the bribery and the fears of civil war did not signifyan age of decadence. In the heart of Rome, the competition for glory was visible in the leaders’ expensive public buildings. An entire new Forum was being paid for by Caesar at vast cost, rivalling the huge stone theatre which had already been paid for by Pompey. The city’s architects were breaking new ground thanks to these new challenges. Above all, the years of tension were to be critical years for Latin thought and literature. Scholarship, philosophy and even the study of religious traditions blossomed under the spectre of the political crises. So did practical law. More interestingly, the superb poems of Catullus ranged from love-poetryto mythical narrative and personal invective, transcending their fine Greek models. At greater length, Lucretius’ fine poem
On the Nature of Things
expressed an Epicurean philosophy of the world and society and the irrelevance to them both of the traditional gods. This masterpiece was probably composed when the crisis had just broken into open Civil War, between 49 and 48.
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By the 50s most of the major participants in Roman political life had studied Greek thought themselves. Even Crassus had a taste for Greek philosophy, as did Marcus Brutus, a man who had named features in his garden after features of ancient Sparta. There was also a sharpened interest in history. Works on chronology tried to interrelate Roman and Greek events and from the mid-50s onwards examples from Greek history became more prominent in Cicero’s writings. Teachers (to his disgust) were even encouraging their pupils in oratory to study the historian Thucydides’ horribly difficult Greek speeches.
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When Civil War broke out, the examples of famous Greeks from the past would become even more immediate to those who became swept up in it.

Above all, there was a frankness of speech, a sharpness of wit and a magnificent scope for oratory. The wit and frankness still live for us in Cicero’s letters, in sayings of Caesar or his rivals and even in letters from Cicero’s lesser but educated friend, young Caelius, who favoured Caesar but wrote so vividly to Cicero on affairs at Rome in the late 50s. Here, we best catch what the ‘liberty’ of speech and thought
reallymeant to such people. It is no coincidence that this age of great court-scenes, great addresses to the Senate and to popular meetings is also the supreme age of Roman oratory.

Not that the glitter was all male, either. Young Caelius was a fine dancer, but so was the remarkable lady Sempronia, whom even her critics admired for her wit, her wide reading and her personal culture.
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No wife of a classical Athenian could have compared with such a character. She was only one of several remarkable women who are known to us in the late Republic: Clodia, the desirable sister of Clodius, was probably the inspiration for Catullus’ best love-poems, while Fulvia, Sempronia’s daughter, was to be the wife of three great husbands, including Clodius and then Mark Antony. Fulvia was the woman whose laments for the dead Clodius had fired a Roman crowd in the Forum. The austere ideals of the wool-working ‘traditional’ housewife were not to the liking of such bold spirits. They had lovers, they joked, they even advised. In autumn 52
BC
, as the crisis loomed, one of the consuls was honoured with a party in which his house was turned into a brothel and two high-society ladies (one of them supposedly Fulvia, the other a former wife of Pompey) were said to have serviced the guests.
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For centuries, the Roman Republic had bent, regrouped and survived new tensions. It had outlived the proud Scipio, Marius even, and the ruthless conservative Sulla. The latest tensions went deep, but could it not survive both Caesar and Pompey too? Huge risks and a swathe of wonderfully unpredictable decisions would have to be taken before Caesar could ever dominate. Even then, the Republic was not dead, although Caesar’s example was essential to its subsequent extinction by his successors. Out in Gaul, while the guests in Rome enjoyed their brothel-party, Caesar was beset with difficulties. His previous Gallic conquests had turned out to be not so secure after all; he still had to pacify them and he had to establish when his provincial command would end. Was it to end in 50 or 49, and if so, preciselywhen in the year? Could he run on, with the help of friendly tribunes’ vetoes, until he was elected consul in absence? Back in Rome, with Clodius gone, even Cicero had begun to hope that he, perhaps, might have a second consulship too. And after the crisis of Clodius’ death, the elections did work again: there were consuls, noble
ones, for 51 and then for 50, and for once, we hear nothing about bribery.

Through the fragmented mirror of Cicero’s letters, we can follow the fascinating steps towards confrontation. In 52 Pompey was still ‘friendly’ to Caesar and Caesar was still said to have retained Pompey as heir to his will. ByJune 51 the question of a successor to Caesar in Gaul was to be raised explicitly in the Senate; on 29 September, however, it was decreed that discussions of the matter would not begin until 1 March 50. Remarks made by Pompey begin to make clear that he had a problem now with Caesar. The biggest problem, then and now, was when exactly Caesar’s command would expire.

The probable answer is that there were two separate dates, one in March 49 for ‘Gaul this side of the Alps and Illyricum’, and one in March 50 for ‘Gaul beyond the Alps’. The former, eventually, was the command which Caesar proposed he should retain, but his rivals were not allowing it. By September 50 the articulate Caelius was writing that the ‘love affair’ between Caesar and Pompey had broken up and that there would soon be a ‘gladiatorial’ fight between the two of them.
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Nonetheless, in November the senators still voted optimistic-ally (by 370 to 22) that both Pompey and Caesar should lay down their respective armies. Overwhelmingly, the senators simply wanted peace. But as if to stiffen Pompey, the consul of the year went out of the city and put a sword in Pompey’s hands.

During persistent meetings in early January 49 the senators heard the contents of letters in which Caesar offered, arguably correctly, to retain only ‘Gaul this side of the Alps and Illyricum’.
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But the noble consul Lentulus had the motion proposed that Caesar should leave his army by a fixed date. It was then blocked by the veto of tribunes: one of them was a loyal supporter of Caesar, now in his mid-thirties, Marcus Antonius (‘Mark Antony’). So on 7 January Lentulus proposed the ‘ultimate decree’ against the vetoing tribunes. Mark Antony and his colleagues promptly fled to Caesar, ever the ‘people’s friend’. Caesar was already at hand on ‘this side’ of the Alps and had only a few of his troops with him. But he did not hesitate. He decided to attack across the river-boundary in to Italy, a frank initiation of a civil war. On 10 January he watched gladiators at exercise, bathed and dressed for dinner. Quietly, he slipped away from his guests and by a
prearranged, roundabout route, reached the river Rubicon where he paused. He thought, it is said, of the enormous evils which would follow for mankind if he crossed and of the reputation of the crossing among posterity. ‘The die is cast,’ he said theatrically, quoting the Greek poet Menander, and then he crossed the river.
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He had already sent a small party of armed commanders ahead of him, but he was right that his crossing was the moment to dramatize. It was also a moment for taking auspices and for religious respect: Caesar dedicated a herd of horses to the river and set them free to run where they pleased. Five years later it would be these horses, men said, who would give him a very different omen.
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