Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  What really motivated Tiberius and Gaius – whether ideological drive or simple ambition – will always remain debatable. What is clear is that, behind the mud-slinging and the eruption of blood-letting in politics, there was a genuine principle at stake. This was the crucial issue of who benefited from the empire, the rich or the poor, and it was one that Tiberius addressed in the most thrilling, explosive fashion. No one before him (certainly no one who was supposed to be ‘one of us’) had so extravagantly antagonized the political élite or so bravely exposed their hypocrisy. In doing so, he did much more than stretch the constitution of the republic to its very limit. He also unleashed the potential of an untapped and highly combustible political force – the mob. The sleeping giant of the Roman republic had been awoken.

  But where Tiberius’s character was by turns idealistic and gentle, stubborn and ambitious, it would take an altogether more meticulous, cold and ruthless mind to harness the power of the people and drive it to its logical conclusion. Such a mind would use the people not simply to take on the conservatives in the Senate, but to rise to power entirely outside the legal apparatus of the republic; it would use them not for the sake of land reform, but to achieve sole mastery of the Roman world. That mind belonged to Julius Caesar.

  II

  CAESAR

  In 46 BC, two years before he was assassinated, Julius Caesar was voted some extraordinary honours by the Senate of the Roman republic. It was decreed that he be called Liberator and that a Temple of Liberty be built and dedicated in his honour.1 And yet the man who had freed the Roman people was now their dictator. The man who had liberated the Romans was also partly responsible for thousands of their deaths in a civil war. Indeed, Caesar, the great champion of the people, had now become in effect an autocrat, on the verge of being worshipped as a god. Two years after the Senate’s vote of honours in 46 BC he would even be murdered in the name of liberty. How had such a state of affairs come to pass? What had happened to the glorious Roman republic? What had happened to its cherished liberties?

  In Rome, during the hundred years before Christ, the idea of liberty became the subject of a fierce debate. In that debate two freedoms clashed time and again: the freedom of the aristocratic élite and the freedom of the Roman people. The two different ideas of liberty amounted to two different versions of what the republic was all about. It was this clash of ideas that would entwine the lives of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, and that would rock the entire Roman world to its foundations.

  Settling the question of which freedom was supreme would bring the state of the Roman republic crashing down in a bloody civil war. The ancient system of public voting, popular elections, annual office holding and joint government by the Senate and the Roman People would cease to function, and would eventually be replaced with a dictatorship, with rule by one man. Elections did indeed continue under Caesar, but now they were no longer free: it was the dictator who influenced them, who had the last vote. It would prove to be one of the greatest turning points in all Roman history.

  But the destruction of the Roman republic was not the consequence of a dry clash of ideas. What turned this ideological debate about freedom into a bloody, violent and messy revolution was a highly personal quality, one that went to the very core of Roman aristocratic values: dignity. A Roman noble’s sense of prestige, honour and political standing was paramount – prized by aristocrats above everything else. Ironically, it would be the very same quality that would drive Julius Caesar to fight a civil war and to destroy the corrupt aristocratic milieu that so cherished it. It was this quality that would fuel the titanic power struggles of Rome in the last years of the republic. It was this quality that would lie at the heart of the republic’s complete meltdown.

  POPULAR POLITICS

  The murder of the tribunes Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus cleaved a fatal divide in the politics of the late Roman republic. Their mother Cornelia declared the Forum of Rome, where both men had been martyred at the hands of the conservative faction of the aristocratic élite, a sacred ground. The very heart of the city thus became their open, public tomb, and around it grew the cult of the popular politician. Henceforth, over the next hundred years, ambitious young men on the make faced a choice: to use the winning of political office to protect the interests of the conservative élite, or to follow the example of the Gracchus brothers and enact legislation that increased the power of the Roman people. One fork of the political path allowed the noble senators to maintain their traditional grip on both the wealth of the ever-increasing empire and the levers of influence in the republic, while the other fork tried to reform the balance of power and wealth in favour of the people.

  The contemperorary writer Varro called these factions the ‘two heads’ of the republic. It is a fitting image, for in the war of attrition that marked the last decades of the republic, there were striking similarities between the two sides. For example, both sides claimed to be defending the republic. On the other hand, they disagreed profoundly over the question of what was to be defended. The conservative constitutionalists claimed they were defending the republic from assault by the revolutionary state-wreckers, while the populists said they were defending the republic from corruption at the hands of a self-serving aristocratic élite.

  The political slogan for both sides was the same too: ‘Liberty’. But, predictably, their definitions of this word were very different. The constitutionalists were fighting for their traditional freedom to exercise their dignity equally and without interference from others in the pursuit of a glorious career; the people they feared were tyrants, would-be kings and powerful individuals who put their interests above those of the republic. The populists, on the other hand, were struggling for the people to have freedom from domination by the élite, and the freedom to pass their own laws. Between these two political groups and their increasingly entrenched positions the pendulum would swing dramatically and violently.

  The battlefield of this struggle was the Plebeian Assembly; the weapon of choice for both sides was the popular vote. The legacy of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus was to give the people’s assembly a new, more authoritative role in the republic at the expense of the Senate. But while the Plebeian Assembly had become more powerful, it was also more susceptible to exploitation. Most Roman citizens who made up thirty-one of the thirty-five electoral tribes lived far away from the city, and it was impractical and costly for them to vote. As a result, the majority never did. Those who could afford to leave their farms tended to be the landed gentry whose sympathies lay with the conservative élite in Rome rather than with the needy. Only the urban mob could be counted on to make up the majority of voters, and they could be easily influenced: the poor might see it in their interests to be swayed by a wealthy benefactor with money to spend; small businessmen and traders by the patronage of their aristocratic customers; former slaves by loyalty to their old masters. In one way or another the voters could be bribed. And as money from the empire flowed into Rome, bribery became rampant. The Gracchus brothers may have shown the potential of the people as a political weapon, but in the last decades of the republic that weapon could be used by both sides.2

  Thus armed, the populists and the conservative aristocrats in the Senate joined battle. Spoiling for a fight after the murders of the Gracchus brothers, it was the populists who landed the first blows. In the 110s BC anti-corruption laws were passed to curb the excesses of provincial governors. Senators were tried and driven out of public life. At the same time the two sides clashed over another flashpoint issue: how were military commands to be allotted – by the Senate or the people? When aristocratic generals proved to be failures in Roman wars against enemies in North Africa and Gaul, the senators responsible were brought to trial by the people for incompetence. They were then promptly replaced with men not of high birth but of proven ability, and on the say-so of the people, not the Senate. On this basis the general Gaius Marius won an unprecedented series of consulships between 108 and 90 BC, ev
en though he had no senatorial ancestry.

  The populist cause went as far as all-out war. Between 90 and 89 BC the armies of the Roman republic went into battle with its disgruntled Italian allies. That bloody, violent war, known as the Social War, came to an end when the Senate agreed to extend Roman citizenship to all Italian communities in Italy south of the river Po. Roman citizenship brought with it the benefits of protection against the arbitrary actions of aristocratic office holders. It was another success marked up by those championing liberty for the Roman people.

  The backlash came in the 80s BC. When Rome clashed with King Mithridates of Pontus, a contender for power in the east, the Senate appointed an arch-conservative, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the consul for 88 BC, to take command of the war. The campaign promised much booty for both the general and the soldiers involved. The appointment was short-lived, however. A tribune of the people vetoed Sulla and proposed instead that the great general Marius be enticed out of retirement and once again given command. Conservative generals peremptorily forced from office in this way would usually have acceded to the sovereign will of the people, however outraged they were. Not Sulla. His response was efficient and devastating. First he won the loyalty of the army under his command. He claimed that if Marius were to win the appointment, it would be veterans from his previous campaigns who would be chosen to reap the rich rewards of victory in the east, not they. The appeal to the soldiers’ financial interests worked. The allegiance of the army sealed, Sulla then marched on Rome, killed the tribune responsible for the veto against him, took over the republic by force in a lightning coup d’état and appointed himself dictator. This position had its origins in an ancient republican office that gave one man emergency powers for a short period of time. Sulla, however, decided to make the office serve one specific purpose: to destroy his political enemies.

  After finally defeating Mithridates in 83 BC and stripping the eastern provinces of wealth, Sulla returned to Rome, defeated his opponents in a battle at the gates of the city, and then proceeded to wreak a brutal and violent revenge on the populists. Proscription lists were posted in the Forum, and Sulla’s soldiers and supporters were charged with hunting down his enemies. Many were killed in the city or forced to flee, their property confiscated. The dictator Sulla’s raft of legislation, designed to cripple the power of the populists and bolster that of the Senate, was equally reactionary.

  Among the new laws was a decree that political offices had to be held in a strict sequence according to the hierarchy of magistracies. It was thus rendered impossible for upstart populists to be fast-tracked straight to the consulship by the people’s vote. The Senate was also enlarged from three hundred to six hundred members, swollen by the intake of Sulla’s supporters. The most provocative laws, however, concerned the office of tribune of the people. This magistracy became a shadow of its former self. Now no tribune, once elected, could stand for any other office (thus the office was made unattractive to men of ambition); a tribune’s every bill had to meet the prior approval of the Senate; and, in addition, the office was stripped of its power of veto. The pendulum of conservative reaction had swung emphatically against the populists.

  His clinical and bloody work done, Sulla returned the republic to the Senate, then retired to Puteoli and the pleasures of a private life in 79 BC. It took the best part of the following decade to restore the ancient powers of the tribunes and to untie the hands of the popular assemblies. The consul who won lavish praise from the people for restoring the last of the tribunician powers in 70 BC was a surprise to many people. He was Rome’s most successful general of the day, and he had proved it by winning two triumphs before he was forty. His reputation, however, had germinated in a bloodier, darker time: he had once been the savage henchman of Sulla. Indeed, as the general who, on behalf of the conservatives in the Senate, had spent much of the 80s BC going to war against the leading populists of the day, he had earned the nickname the ‘Teenage Butcher’. His real name was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – Pompey ‘the Great’.3

  Although the son of a consul and the inheritor of the largest private estate in Italy, Pompey should not be mistaken for an aristocrat at the heart of the Establishment. He was a young man on the make and unencumbered by any sentimental attachment to the political traditions of the republican past. He was, above all, an extraordinary soldier. Ambitious, daring and famed for his mane of blond hair, he was called Magnus (the Great) by his own soldiers (in an echo of his boyhood hero Alexander the Great). He had justified the name with his brilliant execution of a campaign in Africa in 80 BC at the age of twenty-six. His greatest gift, however, was an ability to spot an opportunity that might further his glory. As consul in 70 BC, he seized such an opportunity, changed sides and joined the populists. He not only reinstated the power of the tribunes, but reformed the court juries so that they no longer favoured senators. In addition, he saw to it that sixty-four second-rate senators, all Sullan appointees, were struck off the census list. The people fell in love with him. Although many senators opposed Pompey, the great general had the backing of a young senator, Gaius Julius Caesar.

  With the entry of Pompey and Caesar into the ring of Roman politics in 70 BC, the pendulum of popular politics was about to swing back in favour of the populists, but this time in the most spectacular fashion. There was one simple reason for this. Learning from the ruthless example set by Sulla, Pompey and Caesar would, over the next two decades, accumulate more personal power and influence in Rome than any politician before them. Unlike Sulla, however, they sought to boost not the power of the Senate, but the power of the populists. It was no coincidence that they had restored the power of the tribunes because now, to win such power, they were going to need them.

  POMPEY, CAESAR AND CATO

  Pompey blazed the trail. In 67 BC a tribune proposed to the popular assembly that the people’s hero, even though he held no office at the time, be awarded a special command to rid the Mediterranean of pirates, who were then profiteering in the lawless wake of Rome’s many wars of conquest. The situation had reached crisis point because the pirates’ grip on the Mediterranean was now causing a grain shortage in Rome. The job of defeating the pirate fleets over such a vast geographical space was huge. To pull it off Pompey would need more ships, more soldiers and more time in command than any general had been awarded before.

  Alarm bells went off in the Senate. The power Pompey would have at his disposal – five hundred ships, 120,000 soldiers and a three-year command – would make a mockery of the equality of members of the élite. Granting him that power was as good as establishing a monarch over the republic in all but name. Nonetheless, the people ratified the bill and Pompey set to work. His success astounded everyone. He not only defeated the pirates, but did so in just three months. He then used the rest of his time in command to outstrip this achievement and carry out the single greatest sweep of Roman conquest in the east. It was a feat to rival the great conquest of Greece in the second century BC. Swimming on a tide of extraordinary success, the general was rewarded with another command. Once again, a tribune put a law before the people that would grant Pompey the command of the war to finish off King Mithridates in Asia.

  Pompey was no less ambitious in this task – and his results were even more staggering. Over the next three years, he not only defeated Mithridates, but created and settled – through a combination of diplomacy and war – two new Roman provinces: Syria and Judaea. As a result of both his campaigns, Pompey could boast that he had captured 1000 fortified places, nine hundred cities and eight hundred pirate ships. He had founded thirty-nine cities and, in addition to the 20,000 talents with which the coffers of the public treasury bulged, the public revenue from taxation in the east had nearly doubled – all thanks to Pompey. The senators back in Rome were by turns delighted, amazed and horrified. In Pompey’s appointment of a king here, in his striking of a peace treaty there, or in his capture of a foreign city, it was almost as though he was indeed a new and all-powerful Alex
ander. The senators’ fear remained: would he and his army seize absolute power on his return to Rome?

  Crucially, when Pompey returned to Italy, he dispersed his troops and submitted to the Senate. It was an acknowledgement that, although at the very height of his popularity and power, he had no intention of wielding these attributes against the republic. He had his terms, however: the settlement of his soldiers on plots of Italian soil as a reward for their service, and the ratification of the treaties he had made in the east. This was still a source of concern for the conservatives in the Senate. To agree to these terms would be to acknowledge the preeminence of Pompey in the republic. It would confirm that he had won the personal loyalty both of the Roman army and of kings, potentates and peoples in the east. The conservatives in the Senate did eventually award the people’s hero an unprecedented third triumph, but stopped short of meeting his wishes. They delayed and delayed, shutting the general out in the cold. Here Pompey the Great now languished, with only his growing bitterness for company.

  Meanwhile, in the 60s BC Gaius Julius Caesar, six years Pompey’s junior, was also building personal power. Unlike Pompey, Caesar came from an ancient patrician family that claimed descent from the Trojan Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Aeneas was thought to have been the son of Venus, so Caesar was also able to claim descent from the gods. This was a claim he lost no opportunity to make; it established him as more blue-blooded than anyone else in the Roman republic could possibly be. At the grand, aristocratic funeral of his aunt and his first wife he laid out the two planks of his political career with the economy and effectiveness of a public relations company. He praised his aunt’s divine ancestry (and thus by implication his own too) and also demonstrated his political sympathies, not through words, but actions. As his aunt had been married to the great general Marius, he ensured that mourners paraded her husband’s wax masks. In this way Caesar declared that his was the cause of the populists. Such flamboyance was matched by his dress. Caesar had a reputation as a dandy: he wore his hair carefully parted and combed, and sported his toga with a dashing loose belt.4 Such displays of behaviour offended the conservatives in the Senate. Little did they realize that there was much worse to come.