Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  The effect of that ambition was to build for Caesar an unprecedented power base both abroad and at home. In Rome the news of his exploits thrilled and delighted the people of Rome: they were the stuff of fairy tales, adventure stories, the kind of fable with which Roman parents would excite and inspire their children. While Cato and his allies were carping on about the deformity and sickness of Caesar’s dignity, the people saw that very same thing bringing honour in abundance to the Roman republic. To them, Caesar was putting on the greatest show on earth and the stage was Gaul: ancient, barbaric enemies were being defeated, and not even rivers or oceans could restrain the unfurling arm of Roman power. By the end of 53 BC, Caesar was able to announce that the whole of Gaul was ‘pacified’. Accordingly, his glory was not just being restored – it was rocketing.16

  But Caesar did not rest on the laurels of his foreign exploits to wow the people; he played an active part too. Every winter he set up camp as close to the border of Italy as his province would allow. From there would flow news of extraordinary gifts and benefactions for the Roman people. The centrepiece was Caesar’s announcement that in the heart of Rome a glorious new forum was to be built, paid for with the spoils of Gaul.17 Gifts of a more personal nature also streamed freely into Rome. A rich seam of bribes, as well as letters of recommendation, ensured that Caesar could influence the election of like-minded magistrates prepared to help him and defend his name. Traffic also flowed in the opposite direction. Ambitious young Romans seeking opportunities for wealth and military success thronged in ever-increasing numbers to the one place where the real action was: with Caesar, in Gaul, on campaign. But although Caesar was highly successful in wooing the fast set of Roman politics, Cato and his constitutionalist allies could reassure themselves that at least they had the measure of such opponents. They had been fighting the populist faction in the Forum and the Senate for decades now. What they weren’t prepared for, however, and what was new and far more threatening to their interests, was Caesar’s power base abroad: the army.

  For all the struggle of populist politics, the issue of Rome’s citizen-militia fighting long campaigns, only then to discover they had no farms to return to, had never been solved successfully through land reform. Pompey’s demobilized veterans may have been settled on plots of land during Caesar’s consulship, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, reforms of the army had only made the problem of rootless soldiers worse: the general Marius may have bolstered the number of army recruits by abolishing any property qualification in 107 BC, but the result of this was to fill the legions with men who had no stake at all in the republic. Their only hope for wealth was an army salary and the chance of winning booty on campaign. In Gaul, Caesar was able to provide both in spades. As a result, a new and very dangerous codependent relationship developed between the general and his men. The soldiers were no longer loyal to the republic and its ancient ideology of freedom. Their only loyalty was to the benefactor who was now responsible for their interests: the general. The historian Sallust put it succinctly:

  When anyone seeks power his greatest help is the man in direst poverty, because he is restrained by no attachment to his property, having none, and considers anything honourable for which he receives pay.18

  The same, of course, was even truer of the Germans and Gauls whom Caesar was levying into his army. These new recruits had never set foot in a Roman province, let alone Rome itself. As the years passed, Caesar’s legions grew from the three authorized by his proconsulship to a staggering ten. This put into his hand a weapon more dangerous than any the republic had yet seen: the fierce might of no fewer than 50,000 battle-hardened soldiers, each and every one devoted to his name. It was no wonder, then, that Cato and his allies among the nobles tried to put an end to his power. However, on their first attempt, Caesar, even from his distant outpost of Gaul, knew how to swat it away.

  In 56 BC a senator by the name of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus announced that he was preparing to stand for the consulship with a view to depriving Caesar of his command in Gaul. With his finger on the pulse of Roman politics, Caesar quickly neutralized this threat by renewing his alliance with Pompey. At a meeting in Lucca in northern Italy, he encouraged him and their ally Crassus to stand in elections and beat Ahenobarbus to the consulship. They would then be in a position to help Caesar: through laws proposed by them in the popular assembly, they could make sure that Caesar would be granted an extension of his command for another five years. In return, Pompey and Crassus would be able to consolidate their power and independence from the Senate with lucrative proconsular commands abroad. They would all get what they wanted.

  In Rome Cato spotted the rearguard action of Caesar and Pompey a mile off. He now urged Ahenobarbus not to give in, but to contest the election tooth and nail. ‘We are not fighting,’ said Cato, ‘merely for office, but for liberty against our oppressors!’19 On the day of voting, Pompey’s armed gangs of veterans once again beat up Ahenobarbus and Cato, barred them from entering the Campus Martius and routed their supporters. Pompey and Crassus were duly elected consuls for 55 BC, and Caesar was safe once more. Caesar’s friendship and alliance with Pompey had saved the day. However, the next time Cato and his allies launched a strike against Caesar, the general would not be so lucky.

  Three years later 52 BC saw a turning point in the relationship between Caesar and Pompey. In this year the fatal flaw in Pompey’s character was revealed. The decline in their alliance had begun two years earlier. Pompey’s wife and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, had died in childbirth, the baby surviving the mother for only a few days. In their grief, both men knew that the one key bond that set their alliance beyond politics was now broken. While Caesar grieved over the news in Gaul, in Rome the depth of what was considered to be Pompey the Great’s unbecoming love for Julia was so widely known that even his conservative enemies in the Senate briefly took pity on him.20

  However, it would take a more cataclysmic event before the conservatives actively wooed the man whom they had long feared and suspected. That event began with the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher, an ally of Caesar’s. As a populist tribune of the people, Clodius had successfully established himself as the chief agitator and benefactor of the urban plebs in Rome. In this bid for power his timing had been perfect: in the mid-50s BC the senators, swamped in a mire of allegations of bribery and corruption, were increasingly discredited. Clodius’s sparkling, controversial career suggested that perhaps the people did not want freedom after all, but simply fair, generous masters.21When he was stabbed on a street in a brawl with a rival gang, his death triggered widespread fury. His devout supporters – a motley crew of shopkeepers, street urchins, traders, and the needy and poor of the city’s slums – united in grief on the streets of Rome in their thousands. They descended on the Forum and proceeded to make a funeral pyre for their champion. The place? The Senate House. The fuel? The wooden benches of the senators. No one could stop them. As the Senate House burnt to the ground, a riot quickly swept across the city.

  In the late republic there was no police force. To quell the emergency gripping Rome and restore order, the alarmed senators turned for help to the only man who was able to summon the necessary authority and manpower. That man also happened to be the person whom the conservative majority so despised and mistrusted: Pompey the Great. With the Senate House now a desolate, charred carcass, the nobles swallowed their pride and met in a building attached to a spanking new marble theatre Pompey had built. It was a fitting setting for the meeting. Here the senator Bibulus proposed that the republic’s ablest citizen, Pompey the Great, be granted a new appointment: sole consulship, with exceptional powers to end the anarchy consuming the city. In an even more striking volte-face, Cato, biting his tongue, now stood up and urged his colleagues to agree to the proposal. Grudgingly, he – leader of the constitutionalists – was extending an olive branch to his old enemy.22

  Such an invitation secretly delighted Pompey. Although he had been the peop
le’s hero, Rome’s greatest general, and the power broker behind Caesar’s rise, this had never been quite enough. The reality was that Pompey had always wanted acceptance from the senatorial establishment too. But he wanted the senators to accommodate him on one condition: that they recognized his extraordinary ability, his pre-eminence in the republic, ‘his special position’. To acknowledge that, however, went against every instinct, every fibre in every noble senator. It was contrary to their closely held belief in equality among the Roman élite, their belief that power was circumscribed by annual elections. Their ancestors had founded the republic when they expelled the kings from Rome. Why on earth should they welcome one now? Pompey had always been shut out in the cold. Now, at last, the door was fractionally ajar. What would the great general do?

  While Pompey appeared modest and unassuming, one clever con- temporary had already got his measure: ‘He is apt to say one thing and think another, but is usually not clever enough to keep his real aims from showing.’23 Pompey accepted his command, and his troops duly marched into Rome. Ten years since his extraordinary, triumphant return from the east, the star of Pompey the Great was rising once more. Would it now eclipse even that of his old ally? The answer would not be long in coming.

  ALESIA

  While Caesar waited in his winter base near the border of Italy, anxious to see what Pompey would do, in the rest of Gaul the news of the anarchy in Rome spread like wildfire. The leaders of the Gallic tribes now met in a secret forest location. Embellishing and exaggerating the rumours of a Rome in free fall, they spied an opportunity: to take full advantage of Caesar’s absence from his legions’ winter camps in the north of the country and revolt against their Roman oppressors just when they were at their weakest.24 There was no time to delay. The Carnutes swore an oath to take the initiative, and they promptly honoured it. They descended on the settlement of Cenabum and slaughtered its Roman citizens. As soon as other tribes heard the news, they rallied in support. Of all the tribes in Gaul, however, the Arverni had the distinction of being mustered by a young noble who would become the leader of the united rebellion. His name was Vercingetorix.

  Sending out embassies, Vercingetorix quickly made alliances with the Senones, Parisii, Cadurci, Turoni, Aulerci, Lemovices, Andes and all the Gallic people along the Atlantic coast. Money was raised and armies of Gallic warriors were assembled. Vercingetorix then quickly showed that he had the discipline and determination to match his skills of organization. To bring waverers into line he resorted to cutting off ears, gouging out eyes and even death by burning. Caesar observed respectfully, ‘In his command he combined extreme conscientiousness with extreme severity.’25 In short, Vercingetorix was showing the virtues that Caesar himself most admired – those of a Roman. Vercingetorix was appointed commander of the alliance of Gallic tribes, and within a matter of weeks, most of the tribes of central and northern Gaul had joined the rebellion.

  Caesar responded with lightning speed. Cut off from his legions in the north, he rode south through enemy territory and secured his province from immediate attack, before returning north to reunite with his two legions at their winter quarters. His achievement in stabilizing the situation was all the more extraordinary because it was the depths of winter and central Gaul was sunk beneath 2 metres (6 feet) of snow.26 Rivers were frozen, forests had become impenetrable snowscapes and, where the biting temperatures eased, the rush of flood water from the hills made lakes of the marshy plains.27 Despite these disadvantages, once Caesar had successfully assembled his entire army, he recognized that the united rebellion in fact presented him with a unique opportunity: to crush the resistance and pacify Gaul once and for all.

  With this in mind, Caesar inflicted setback after setback on Vercingetorix’s allies. In response, Vercingetorix changed tactics. He decided not to defeat Caesar in battle, but to starve the Romans out of his land by destroying the food supplies of towns close to them. The decisive encounter in the battle of wills between the two men eventually took place in the summer of 52 BC, after Vercingetorix, defeated in open battle, withdrew his army to the town of Alesia.

  Alesia was built on an elevated plateau, but despite its vast natural defences Caesar did not hesitate to put the town under siege by building a huge impregnable wall around it. A staggering 18 kilometres (11 miles) in circumference, the wall featured twenty-three forts and eight camps along its length. In addition, the eastern side featured three trenches, each approximately 6 metres (20 feet) wide and deep. Caesar ordered the innermost trench to be flooded. To that end the two rivers that flowed on either side of the town were diverted. Although, after six years on campaign, the tasks of putting up earthworks, walls and watchtowers were routine to Caesar’s well-drilled soldiers, the sheer scale and ambition of the siege remain awe-inspiring to this day. But Caesar was not finished yet. When he learnt from Gallic deserters that Vercingetorix was expecting reinforcements, he simply ordered a second wall to be built – facing outwards to protect the besieging Romans from attack in the rear and running parallel to the inner wall. This outer wall was no less than 22 kilometres (14 miles) in circuit.

  Inside the city walls, Vercingetorix decided to wait for reinforcements to arrive before launching his attack. However, he knew the clock was ticking. In Alesia the Gauls had enough food for just thirty days.28 As the weeks passed, the rations were shared out ever more sparingly. When they were nearly finished and the Gallic reinforcements were still nowhere to be seen, a meeting was convened at which some leaders proposed a horrific solution: to survive by eating the flesh of those who were too old to fight in the campaign. Vercingetorix rejected the plan. But the pressure was now on him to come up with a way out. So he did. The outcome of this battle would decide the fate of Gaul for ever, he said. Surrender would mean just one thing: the end of Gallic liberty. To win the battle ahead it was essential to do whatever was in their power to preserve the remaining rations for those who were able to fight. His solution was to hand over all the women, children and the elderly to the Romans. He knew Caesar would then be forced to take the prisoners in, feed them, and thus further deprive the Roman army.

  But Vercingetorix had not banked on how ruthless and single-minded Caesar could be. As thousands of Gauls were forced out of the city gates and begged the Romans to take them in, Caesar and Vercingetorix went eyeball to eyeball. Neither man blinked, and as a result, over the coming days, every single one of those women, children and the elderly died from starvation and cold, trapped between the walls of the city they had left behind and the Roman siege wall. One ancient author said of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul that one million Gauls were killed and another million enslaved.29 Today these figures are considered by most scholars to be exaggerated. Nonetheless, in them is the suggestion of the awesome, terrifying coldness of Caesar’s decision at Alesia, the extremes to which he was prepared to go in the name of his dignity and that of the Roman people.

  Eventually, the Gallic reinforcements arrived and assembled on the heights looking down on the plain below. They numbered more than 200,000 infantry and 8000 cavalry. So it was that one hot day in the summer of 52 BC the full, terrible onslaught of two Gallic armies descended headlong to trap the Romans, the allies attacking the outer wall, while Vercingetorix’s armies broke out of the city and assaulted the inner fortifications. The yells and screams of the Gallic allies were matched and echoed by those rising up from inside Alesia. The Romans spread out along their walls. They held out determinedly for the first days of fighting. However, the Roman cavalry did not fare so well, and were saved only when an auxiliary German cavalry routed the Gauls. When night fell, the Gauls once again scampered down the hill under cover of darkness and filled in the trenches with earth; when day broke they attempted once more to breach the Roman wall and unite with their allies. This time, they were repulsed by volleys of sling bullets, heavy-duty catapults and stakes hidden in the ground. On the third day, however, spies alerted the Gauls to a point of weakness at the Roman camp stationed halfway u
p a hill.

  Immediately, the reinforcements of Gallic cavalry massed at the top of the hill and attacked from above, while once again Vercingetorix’s men attacked the wall from below. The Romans, terrified by the noise on either side, were running out of strength, numbers and weapons. This was the critical moment of the battle, and both sides fought with utter ferocity. Caesar rode along the ramparts to rally his men in person, shouting at them and explaining how ‘all the fruits of their labour depended upon that day, that hour’.30 Finally, he deployed his reserves of cavalry to attack the Gauls in the rear, and, riding at their head, he now threw himself into the frenetic fighting.

  As the scarlet colour of his cloak heralded his arrival, a booming shout went up from the Roman defences. The tables had turned, and it was now the allied Gauls who were trapped on both sides by the Romans. When they saw the Roman cavalry arrive, they turned tail and fled. Under the eyes of Vercingetorix’s army still inside Alesia, the huge allied army of Gauls was supremely routed, melting away ‘like a ghost or a dream’.31 Caesar’s description of the battle’s conclusion was typically terse: ‘Massive slaughter followed’.32 Only utter exhaustion prevented the Roman soldiers from giving chase and killing more.

  Completely outnumbered, Caesar had relied on daring, tactical genius, the efficiency of his unprecedented siege operations, and the bravery of his men to pull off one of the greatest victories in all Roman history. Although there were pockets of resistance to mop up, Gaul was now Roman – another province of a vast empire. In due course it would provide Rome with an annual tribute of 40 million sesterces.33

  The conquest of Gaul also brought its proconsul astounding personal riches, as well as unparalleled glory in the eyes of the Roman people and a quasi-private fighting force of ten Roman legions prepared to do whatever he asked of them. Cato knew it, his allies in the Senate knew it, and even Pompey knew it. The knowledge only brought with it unease. For the question that was now uppermost in Caesar’s mind was how to do what no other Roman – not even Pompey the Great – had yet achieved: translate his power into power in Rome.