Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire
Page 11
In the early 70s BC Caesar made his political sympathies apparent when he undertook to prosecute two corrupt aristocratic governors of the provinces of Macedonia and Greece. Although he lost the trials, he gained great popularity with the plebs. Through his eloquence, ebullient charm and friendly good manners, he showed how easily he could win people over.5 However, he realized that to win sufficient favour with the Roman people to reach the highest offices in the republic it was necessary to make a much bigger splash than that. With this ambition in mind, Caesar exploited office after office for all it was worth.
The post of curule aedile, for example, carried with it the responsibility of staging public games on state holidays. Elected to this position in 65 BC, Caesar duly seized the opportunity to wow the people of Rome by putting on the most spectacular gladiatorial games the city had ever seen. No fewer than 320 pairs of gladiators clad in burnished silver armour prepared to compete for glory and delight the public. The anticipated occasion caused such a sensation with the Roman people that the conservatives in the Senate immediately proposed a bill curtailing the number of gladiators any individual might keep in the city.6 In this way, they tried to deter the politician from so shamelessly winning popular favour. In the event, the people had to make do with a more modest show, but the impact had been made.
Such lavish events required money – and lots of it. To recoup his massive debts, Caesar next set his sights on being elected to administer a province, plundering it for booty and repaying his debtors on his return. After his praetorship, he did just this – in the province of Further Spain in 61 BC. Straying from his ordinary duties of governor, he set about warring with the independent tribes of northern Portugal, and proved himself to be as much a fighter and general abroad as he was a suave and debonair populist politician at home. So successful was he that he focussed his ambitions on requesting a triumph – the perfect launch pad, the young general thought, for his election campaign to the highest office of the republic: the consulship. However, on his return to Rome, all did not go according to plan.
The man who was determined to scupper Caesar’s smooth path to the consulship was the arch-constitutionalist of the day, Marcus Porcius Cato. Inflexible, humourless and much older in character than his thirty-five years, Cato wanted his life to embody an ideal of austere and ancient republican virtue. His hair was dishevelled in the manner of a peasant, his beard hoary and unkempt, and in protest at the fad among the élite for wearing a light, luxurious purple, Cato insisted on wearing black. His contemporary Cicero said of him that he walked around Rome as if he were living ‘in the ideal republic of Plato, not the cesspit of Romulus’.7 Dinner chez Cato was no self-respecting senator’s idea of a fun night out. Indeed, as Caesar returned to Rome, Cato showed how he lived and breathed the constitutional laws of the republic, how determined he was to use them to stop the populists from gaining power.
Outside the city walls Caesar sent in his formal request to the Senate for a triumph to mark his conquests in Spain. He also stated that he wished to stand for the consulship in the imminent July elections. Cato’s reply came back: according to law, he could not have both. Caesar was caught in a dilemma. To receive a triumph he had to wait outside Rome until the day of celebration. To stand for the consulship, however, he had to enter the city immediately and offer his candidacy in person. Caesar, said Cato, had to decide between the two: the glory of a grand popular procession through Rome, or a bid for a top job in the republic.8
Caesar chose to stand for the consulship. As we shall see, it was a decision that would change the course of Roman history for ever. However, the outcome of the election was not guaranteed. In order to secure the office of consul and also recoup the popular favour he had lost in forgoing his triumph, Caesar now urgently needed both money and influence. The only man in the republic who was willing and able to provide these things was none other than the sulking Pompey the Great. The two great populists of the day now made a pact. Pompey would give Caesar financial and popular support to win election to the consulship; and Caesar, once elected consul, would give Pompey what he most wanted. On Pompey’s behalf, he would propose the very laws that the fearful conservative senators had long refused – the settlement of Pompey’s veterans and the ratification of his treaties in the east.
The alliance of the two men was potentially so powerful and threatening that, at the election for the consulship in the summer of 60 BC, the conservatives led by Cato would stop at nothing to prevent Caesar and Pompey getting their way. The two sides, constitutionalists and reformers, conservatives and populists joined battle once more. In the build-up to the election in July 60 BC the deep pockets of Pompey and his wealthy ally Marcus Licinius Crassus ensured that bribes flooded into the Campus Martius, the place where the people voted in the elections for consul. Even Cato, the priggish adherer to the letter of law, resorted to bribery to promote a conservative candidate, his son-in-law Marcus Bibulus.9 Cato and his conservative allies were so desperate to ensure that at least one of the consuls could be relied upon to restrain Caesar that they were prepared to play as dirty as the populist bloc fronted by Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. In the event, Caesar won a massive majority, but Cato could claim success too. By a whisker, Bibulus was elected as Caesar’s fellow consul. But the battle had only just begun.
The year of Caesar’s consulship represents the logical conclusion of the long struggle between the populists and the constitutionalists. Above all, it shows how the populists had now gained the upper hand. For the striking innovation of 59 BC was that the leading populist of the day, the man who was prepared to buck tradition and defy the wishes of the Senate, was no longer a tribune of the people. He was a man in possession of one of the greatest sources of power in the republic – the consulship. The radical tactics of the tribunes were now applied to that post. When, for example, Caesar proposed Pompey’s land bill to settle his troops, he met with a wall of resolute opposition rallied by Cato. So instead of backing down to the collective will of his fellow senators, as was customary for a consul to do, he simply walked out of the Senate House, took the bill direct to the popular assembly and had it passed there. But Caesar was prepared to go to even greater extremes. When, on other days of voting on Caesar and Pompey’s programme, his fellow consul Bibulus repeatedly tried to obstruct the public business by declaring that the omens were not good, Caesar simply ignored him and pressed ahead anyway. Was Caesar breaking the law? Cato certainly thought so.
In the feverish tension of 59 BC Caesar and Pompey compounded their ‘illegalities’. They introduced once again an ominous element used by both sides in the war of popular politics: brute force. When Cato obstructed any discussion of the land bill in the Senate, Caesar had his lictors seize the braying senator and throw him into prison. It was a small taste of things to come. The menacing threat of Pompey’s veterans, of thousands of former soldiers loyal to one man, now descended on Rome. In order to make sure that the vote on the land bill went their way, gangs of Pompey’s thugs simply entered the Forum on the day of voting and cleared it of all opponents to the bill. In one encounter Cato and Bibulus were carried off, their entourage of officials beaten up and the magistrate’s rods of office smashed. As a final humiliating insult, a bucket of excrement was thrown over the consul’s head.
The next day Bibulus called a meeting of the Senate and complained about how he had been so violently and illegally treated. The sympathetic senators were at a loss how to respond. For the rest of the year Bibulus stayed indoors in constant fear of his life. The energetic Caesar, meanwhile, simply boycotted the Senate House and the normal procedures of politics, and brought all his populist legislation without hindrance direct to the people’s assembly. It was an extraordinary year. And it was not over yet.
It was the custom of every consul, once his year in office had come to an end, to govern a Roman province, chosen by the Senate, as proconsul. In one last-ditch attempt at restraining the ambitious, calculating Caesar, Cato and the cons
ervatives decided to send him to the quiet pastures of Italy. Here there were no wars to fight, no mass of booty to plunder and no opportunity to win the loyalty of an army. In short, it spelt the premature end of Caesar’s brilliant, show-stealing career. But Caesar had other ideas. He instigated a loyal tribune of the people to bring a new law to the assembly, granting him the more promising provinces of Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul on the eastern side of the Alps, see map, page 119) and Illyricum (the Dalmatian coast) for a period of five years. By an extraordinary stroke of luck, however, the governor of Transalpine Gaul (on the western side of the Alps) died in the spring of 59 BC, leaving that province too in urgent need of a commander. This region of Gaul was the gateway to lands untouched by Roman rule. It offered an appetizing prospect for war, conquest and riches.
In the Senate Pompey proposed that Caesar be awarded the new command of Illyricum and the Gallic provinces. The sad, broken remnants of the aristocratic élite still prepared to show up for senatorial meetings duly granted it. If they had refused, the people’s assembly would have given it to him anyway; by granting the command to Caesar themselves, they saved face and gave the impression, at least, of retaining some power over the people’s assembly.10
But even in their gloom, the traditionalists could find something to raise a meagre cheer. By the time Caesar left for Gaul, he had alienated not just the entire Senate, but even some of the people too. His legislation had not benefited all sections of the plebs, and some were now asking if his methods were not just as corrupt as those of the discredited aristocrats from whom he said he was liberating Rome. ‘The truth is,’ wrote the senator Cicero at the time, ‘the present regime is the most infamous, most disgraceful, most uniformly odious to all sorts and classes and ages of men that ever was . . . Those “populist” politicians have taught even quiet folk to hiss!’11 Above all, however, Caesar had successfully galvanized one gritty, single-minded enemy in particular: Cato.
The dour, tenacious senator remained utterly determined to stop Caesar’s accumulation of power, and now he believed he had the weapon with which to do it. Cato assured his allies that he had grounds for prosecuting Caesar in a court of law over the illegalities perpetrated during his consulship. Yes, it was true that while Caesar was still in office, Cato could not touch him. But as soon as the term of his commands in Gaul came to an end and he returned to Rome, Caesar would be taken to court like a common criminal.
Nonetheless, Cato’s plans for revenge lay a long way off in the future. When Caesar rode off to Gaul in the spring of 58 BC, he and his ally Pompey seemed untouchable. The consuls and tribunes elected for that year were their loyal friends, and in this way they made sure that all the legislation they had enacted would not be undone. The two men had also sealed their alliance in an old-fashioned and aristocratic manner. Caesar had offered Pompey the hand of his only daughter, Julia, in marriage, and in the spring of 59 BC the ageing general had duly wed his charming young bride.
And yet the supreme alliance between the two men was now about to be tested to the limit. For while Pompey remained behind in Rome surrounded by enemies baying for his blood, Caesar was about to win unimaginable glory. And with that glory would come unimaginable power.
THE BALANCE OF POWER
The status of the small Roman province of Gallia Transalpina, in what is now the south of France, is reflected in its modern name: Provence. The Romans called the northern territory beyond it ‘Long-haired Gaul’ because of the horrendous, unkempt specimens of barbarity said to live there. The simple fact was that although the Roman Senate had made some leaders of the more powerful tribes official ‘Friends of the Roman People’, and although pioneering Roman merchants had penetrated along the rivers of the Rhone and Garonne to ply a roaring trade in wine, the dank and cold woods of the north were regarded by most civilized Romans as a threatening unknown. Worse, to many minds the region represented the greatest source of danger to Roman rule.12
What prompted such fear? In 390 BC, savage hordes of barbarian warriors from Gaul had achieved what even the great Carthaginian Hannibal had not. Rampaging their way through Italy, they had successfully sacked the city of Rome. More recently, those ancient Roman fears were painfully revived when, in 102 and 101 BC, it took the might of Marius’s well-drilled, highly organized legions to defend Italy from another fierce invasion of Gallic and Germanic tribes. But with the governorship of Julius Caesar, the legendary fear in which Gaul was held was about to come to a permanent end.
When Caesar arrived in Gaul he had no instructions or legal authority to wage war. Indeed, just the year before a law had been passed curbing the arbitrary actions of Roman provincial governors. Caesar would have known all about this. It was none other than he, as consul, who had devised and proposed the bill. And yet even regarding his own populist laws, Caesar was meticulous in calculating the moment to break them. In 58 BC the tribe of the Helvetii migrated from their home in present-day Switzerland and passed close to the doorstep of Caesar’s province. In response, the proconsul deliberately stationed his army 16 kilometres (10 miles) outside the boundaries of his province, directly in their path. Falling into his trap, the Helvetii attacked the Roman army. To the Roman commander this was a gift. Caesar quickly exploited a time-honoured legal loophole: he was, he said, defending the Roman republic from aggression and repairing the injury done to his dignity.13
Caesar called together his three legions stationed at Aquileia in northern Italy, raised two more legions in Cisalpine Gaul, and promptly taught the Helvetii a harsh lesson in battle. There was uproar in the Senate, Cato’s being the loudest voice. Caesar, he said, was simply doing as he pleased: illegally instigating wars with independent tribes not subject to Rome; illegally levying troops and filling up his legions with non-Roman citizens; and illegally granting them citizenship. He was becoming, cried Cato, his own self-appointed judge and jury, heaping crime upon crime against the republic!
The reality was that in the war against the Helvetii Caesar had declared in unambiguous terms his true intention as governor in Gaul. On whatever grounds, on whatever pretext, however flimsy, he was going to single- mindedly pursue a series of wars with the Gallic tribes beyond his province until the whole of Gaul, the sprawling and unknown tracts of that dark, sinister northern land, had been completely pacified and brought under Roman rule. Over the course of the next eight years Caesar set about honouring that intention with seemingly limitless confidence and ambition.
In 57 BC he demonstrated to the Gauls the extraordinary might of his legions by defeating the tribe of the Belgae. They were widely considered to have been the hardiest and bravest of the Gauls because they lived in the north ‘furthest away from the culture and civilization of the Province’.14 When, in 55 BC, two Germanic tribes, the Usipetes and the Tencteri, crossed the Rhine and attacked the Romans, Caesar did not simply lead his army in battle, cutting the 400,000-strong enemy to pieces. He used the survivors’ retreat into Germany to stage perhaps the most daring action of his command.
Across the 350-metre (1155-feet) width of the Rhine’s swelling rapids, Caesar ordered his army engineers to build a bridge. Such a feat of engineering had never before been contemplated, let alone attempted. But as the Romans drove great piles of wood into the river bed to yoke the river, it was almost as though they could control Mother Nature herself. The bridge complete, Caesar then crossed the river with his army and invaded the alien country. The Germanic tribes of the Suevi and Sugambri, who had never seen a bridge before, were so awestruck by the outlandish feat that they retreated into the deep forests and hid. Caesar then burnt and ravaged the nearby lands, and told all those who remained to pass on to the German tribes one very clear message: never again make an enemy of Rome. Then, as quickly as they had come, he and his army disappeared and returned to Gaul, dismantling the bridge en route. The entire exploit had taken a mere twenty-eight days.
A glimpse into what was driving Caesar in Gaul is revealed in his own account of the Gallic Wars. He built
a bridge because he considered crossing the river by boat beneath ‘his dignity’.15Dignitas was the pre-eminent quality of a patrician Roman politician, and it was rooted in an historic sense of worth, rank and prestige. The more ancient and aristocratic the Roman family, the greater the dignity accumulated and the higher the point at which that sense of worth was pegged. Caesar’s own acute sense of his dignity had been at the heart of his pursuit of office in Rome, had motivated his actions as consul, and was now driving him on to ever greater feats of glory in Gaul. To cap his achievements abroad, in 55 and 54 BC Caesar prepared a fleet, crossed the English Channel and launched an invasion of Britain, a country that many Romans did not believe even existed. On his second attempt, Caesar stayed in Britain for the summer, getting as far as the river Thames and securing tribute from several British tribes. Although no permanent Roman base was established, Caesar had succeeded in making another dramatic statement of his ambition.