SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  The controversies of this period in the mid first century BCE are documented in vivid microdetail, thanks largely to the letters of Cicero, sometimes written daily and full of unsubstantiated rumours, second-guessing, hints of plots, half-truths, gossip, unreliable speculation and foreboding. ‘The political situation alarms me more each day’ and ‘There is a whiff of dictatorship in the air’ are typical refrains, among more practical exchanges about loans and debts or triumphalist news of Caesar’s daring, if very temporary, landing on Britain. They offer extraordinary evidence for politics as it happened that is unique in the classical world, and probably in any world before the fifteenth century CE. Yet they also tend to exaggerate the impression of confusion and political breakdown, or at least present a picture that is hard to compare with earlier periods. How disordered and cut-throat might the world of Scipio Africanus and Fabius Cunctator appear had their private letters and jottings survived rather than just the retrospective accounts of Livy and others? What is more, the overwhelming quantity of material from Cicero’s pen can make it hard to see beyond his perspectives and prejudices.

  The career of Publius Clodius Pulcher is a case in point. Clodius first crossed swords with Cicero in a scandal at the end of 62 BCE, after a man was discovered in what was supposed to be a solemn, all-female religious festival being led by Julius Caesar’s wife. Some suspected that this was a lovers’ tryst rather than a simple prank, and Caesar took the precaution of a speedy divorce, on the famous grounds that ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’. Many pointed the finger of blame at Clodius, who was put on trial, with Cicero appearing as a key witness for the prosecution. The upshot was an acquittal and lasting enmity between Clodius and Cicero – who predictably, but possibly wrongly, claimed that massive bribery had secured the verdict of not guilty.

  Clodius’ subsequent reputation for outright villainy has been almost entirely formed by Cicero’s enmity. He has gone down in history as the mad patrician who not only arranged to be adopted into a plebeian family in order to stand for the tribunate but also put two fingers up to the whole process by choosing an adoptive father younger than himself. Once elected, in 58 BCE he engineered Cicero’s exile for the tough line he had taken against Catiline’s associates, introduced a series of laws that attacked the whole basis of Roman government, and terrorised the streets with his private militia. Rome was saved from this monster only when he was killed in 52 BCE after picking a fight with the slaves of one of Cicero’s friends, at the so-called Battle of Bovillae. No alternative views of Clodius have survived. But almost certainly the other side of the story would have made him a radical reformer in the tradition of the Gracchi (one of his laws made the distribution of grain in the city entirely free), lynched by a reactionary thug and his hangers-on. Not even Cicero’s efforts for the defence secured acquittal on the murder charge for his friend, who ended up a neighbour of Verres in exile in Marseilles.

  The politics of the 50s BCE are a curious mixture of business as usual, perilous breakdown and ingenious, or desperate, attempts to adapt traditional political rules to meet new crises as they appeared. It is hard to know what to make of Cicero in the late 50s BCE, in the safety of his study, writing about the theory of Roman politics in ways that would have been familiar to Polybius while only a few hundred metres from his house on the Palatine there were increasingly frequent riots in the Forum and outbreaks of violence and arson, including the torching of the senate house for Clodius’ funeral pyre. Perhaps this was his attempt to restore order, at least in his head. Others took more practical measures and devised some brave innovations. In 52 BCE, for example, after the murder of Clodius, Pompey was elected sole consul. Rather than resort to appointing a dictator to take charge of the growing crisis, with all the memories of Sulla’s dictatorship, the senate decided to give to one man an office which by definition had always been shared between two. This time the gamble paid off. Within a few months Pompey had not only taken firm control of the city but also taken a colleague, albeit keeping it in the family: it was his new father-in-law.

  More problematic were the tactics adopted by, or forced upon, Julius Caesar’s fellow consul in 59 BCE, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, a staunch opponent of much of the legislation Caesar was introducing. Menaced by Caesar’s supporters, showered with that all too familiar vehicle of Roman disaffection – excrement – and more or less confined to his house, he was unable to voice his opposition in any of the regular ways. So he stayed at home and sent out messages announcing that he was ‘watching the heavens’ for signs and omens. There was definite religious and political force behind this. The support of the gods underpinned Roman politics, and it was an essential axiom that no political decision could be taken until it was clear that there were no adverse omens. Yet ‘watching the heavens’ was never intended as a means of obstructing political action indefinitely, and those on Caesar’s side claimed that Bibulus was illegitimately manipulating religious rules. The issue was never resolved. It was typical of the uncertainties of the period, and of the difficulties the Romans faced in making old rules solve new dilemmas, that for years the status of all the public business conducted in 59 BCE remained unclear. In the late 50s BCE Cicero was still wondering about the legality of Clodius’ adoption and the settlement of Pompey’s veterans. Had the legislation all been properly passed or not? Very different views were possible.

  The most pressing political issue of the period, however, came not directly from Rome but from Caesar in Gaul. He had left Italy in 58 BCE on a five-year command, and this was rolled on for another five years in 56 BCE – with the warm support, in public at least, of Cicero, who pointed to the danger of Gallic enemies much as he had earlier pointed to the danger of Mithradates. Caesar’s description of these campaigns in the seven volumes of his Commentaries on the Gallic War, an edited version of his official annual dispatches from the front line sent back to Rome, starts with its famous, clinical opener, ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’ (‘The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts’). It ranks alongside Xenophon’s description (the Anabasis, or Going Up) of his exploits with a Greek mercenary army, written in the fourth century BCE, as the only detailed eyewitness account of any ancient warfare to survive. It is not exactly a neutral document. Caesar had a shrewd eye for his public image, and the Commentaries is a carefully contrived justification of his conduct and parade of his military skills. But it is also an early example of what we might call imperial ethnography. Unlike Cicero, whose letters from Cilicia betray no interest whatsoever in the local surroundings, Caesar was deeply engaged with the foreign customs he witnessed, from the drinking habits of the Gauls, including the barbaric prohibition of wine among some tribes, to the religious rituals of the Druids. His is a wonderfully Roman vision of people whom he clearly did not entirely understand, but it still forms the basic reference point for modern discussions of the culture of pre-Roman northern Europe – an irony, given that it was a culture he was in the process of changing for ever.

  Reading between the lines of the Commentaries, anyone will see that both genuine Roman anxieties about enemies in the north and Caesar’s desire to outstrip in military glory any of his rivals drove the decade of warfare in Gaul. Caesar ended up bringing more territory under Roman control than Pompey had in the East and crossing over what Romans called ‘the Ocean’, the waterway that separated the known world from the great unknown, to set foot briefly on the remote and exotic island of Britain. It was a symbolic victory that resonated loudly back home, even earning a passing reference in a poem by Catullus, when he wrote about ‘going to visit the memorials of “Caesar the Great”: the Rhine in Gaul, the terrible sea and the faraway Britons’.

  In doing this, Caesar laid the foundations for the political geography of modern Europe, as well as slaughtering up to a million people over the whole region. It would be wrong to imagine that the Gauls were peace-loving innocents brutally trampled by Caesar’s forces. One Greek visitor in the early first century BCE had
been shocked to find enemy heads casually pinned up at the entrance to Gallic houses, though he conceded that, after a while, one got used to the sight; and Gallic mercenaries had done good business in Italy until the power of Rome had closed their market. Yet the mass killing of those who stood in Caesar’s way was more than even some Romans could take. Cato, driven partly no doubt by his enmity of Caesar and speaking from partisan as well as humanitarian motives, suggested that he should be handed over for trial to those tribes whose women and children he had put to death. Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

  The pressing question was what would happen when Caesar left Gaul and how after almost ten years there from 58 BCE, with the power and wealth he had accumulated, he was to be reintegrated into the ordinary mainstream of politics. As often, Romans debated this in highly legal terms. There were fierce and technical controversies about the precise date on which his military command was supposed to come to an end and whether he would then be allowed to move directly, without a break, into another consulship. For any period as a private citizen, out of office, would provide a window for a prosecution, among other things over the questionable legality of his acts in 59 BCE. On the one hand were those who, for whatever reasons, personal or principled, wanted to bring Caesar back down to size; on the other, Caesar and his supporters insisted that this treatment was humiliating, that his dignitas – a distinctively Roman combination of clout, prestige and right to respect – was being attacked. The underlying issue was brutally straightforward. Would Caesar, with more than 40,000 troops at his disposal only a few days from Italy, follow the example of Sulla or of Pompey?

  Pompey himself cautiously remained on the sidelines almost up to the final breakdown and in the middle of 50 BCE was still trying to find Caesar a reasonably honourable exit strategy. In December of that year the senate voted by a majority of 370 to 22 that Caesar and Pompey should simultaneously give up their commands. Pompey was actually in Rome at the time, but since 55 BCE, thanks to another piece of ingenuity, he had been the governor of Spain, doing the job remotely, through deputies – an unprecedented arrangement that became a standard feature of the rule of the emperors. It is the clearest sign of the impotence of the senate at this point that, in response to this overwhelming vote, Pompey took no notice and Caesar, after a few more rounds of fruitless negotiation, marched into Italy.

  Throwing the dice

  Sometime around 10 January 49 BCE, Julius Caesar, with just one of his legions from Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, the river that marked the northern boundary of Italy. The exact date is not known, nor even the location of this most historically significant of rivers. It was more likely a small brook than the raging torrent of popular imagination, and – despite the efforts of ancient writers to embellish them with dramatic appearances of the gods, uncanny omens and prophetic dreams – the reality of the surroundings was probably mundane. For us, ‘to cross the Rubicon’ has come to mean ‘to pass the point of no return’. It did not mean that to Caesar.

  According to one of his companions on the journey – Gaius Asinius Pollio, historian, senator and founder of Rome’s first public library – when he finally approached the Rubicon after some hesitation, Caesar quoted in Greek two words from the Athenian comic playwright Menander: literally, in a phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods. Let’s throw the dice in the air and see where they will fall! Who knows what will happen next?

  46. A portrait of Julius Caesar? Finding an authentic likeness of Caesar, apart from the tiny images on coins, has been one of the goals of modern archaeology. There are hundreds of ‘portraits’ made after his lifetime, but contemporary versions have been much more elusive. This portrait in the British Museum was once a favoured candidate, but is now suspected of being a fake.

  What did happen next was four years of civil war. Some of Caesar’s supporters in Rome rushed to join him in northern Italy, while Pompey was pushed into the command of the ‘anti-Caesarians’ and decided to leave Italy and fight from his power base in the East. In 48 BCE his forces were defeated at the Battle of Pharsalus in northern Greece, and Pompey was murdered soon after, when he tried to take refuge in Egypt. But despite his famed speed (celeritas was one of his watchwords), Caesar still took three more years, until 45 BCE, to overcome his Roman adversaries in Africa and Spain, as well as to squash trouble from Pharnaces, the son and usurper of Mithradates. Between crossing the Rubicon and his death in March 44 BCE, Caesar made only fleeting visits to Rome; the longest was the five-month stretch from October 45 BCE. From the point of view of the city, he became a largely absent dictator.

  In some ways, this civil war between Pompey and Caesar was as odd as the Social War. How many people it directly involved is impossible to say. The priority of many of the inhabitants of Italy, and of the empire, was probably to avoid getting inadvertently caught up in the struggles of rival armies and to keep clear of the crime wave that the war unleashed in Italy. Only occasionally do such ordinary people on the margins get even a small share of the limelight: the captain of a trading ship, Gaius Peticius, who kindly picked up a bedraggled Pompey from the Greek coast after the Battle of Pharsalus is one; Soterides, a eunuch priest who inscribed on stone his worries about his male ‘partner’, who had sailed off with a party of local volunteers and been taken prisoner, is another. Of the partisans, on one side were the backers of Caesar, with his popular political programme and clear leanings towards one-man rule. Cicero assumed that this was where the sympathies and interests of the poor naturally lay. On the other side were a motley group of those who, for various reasons, did not like what Caesar was up to or the powers he seemed to be seeking. A few were probably as highly principled as they were unrealistic; as Cicero once said of Cato, ‘he talks as if he were in the Republic of Plato, when in fact he is in the crap of Romulus’. But it was only later, in the romantic nostalgia under the early emperors, that they were reinvented en bloc as fully fledged freedom fighters and martyrs united in the struggle against autocracy. The irony was that Pompey, their figurehead, was no less an autocrat than Caesar. Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was set to be much the same: slavery for Rome. What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choose between rival emperors.

  47. The family of the Peticius who rescued Pompey was active in trade in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. This tombstone of one of his descendants, found in North Italy, features a loaded camel, which must have been a symbol – even a trademark – of his overseas business.

  One major change, however, was that Roman civil war now involved almost all the known world. Whereas the wars between Sulla and his rivals had witnessed occasional incidents in the East, the war between the Caesarians and the Pompeians played out right across the Mediterranean, from Spain to Greece and Asia Minor. Famous names met their ends in far-flung places. Bibulus, Caesar’s unfortunate colleague in 59 BCE, died at sea near Corfu as he was trying to blockade the Greek coast. The murderer of Clodius, Titus Annius Milo, left his exile to join a Pompeian uprising and fell in the toe of Italy, hit by a flying stone. Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the most gory way imaginable. According to his biographer, writing 150 years later, he stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the doctor they had summoned and pulled out his own bowels through the still open wound.

  Egypt had a significant supporting role too. It was there that Pompey, the man who had once ruled the Roman world, met his ignominious end in 48 BCE. He was expecting a warm w
elcome as he put to shore. In fact, he was decapitated by the henchmen of a local dynast, who calculated that disposing of the enemy leader would ingratiate him with Caesar. Reflecting on this moment, many Roman observers, Cicero included, agreed that it would have been far better for Pompey to have died a couple of years earlier, when he fell seriously ill in 50 BCE. As it was, ‘his life lasted longer than his power’. The murder, however, proved a wrong move for its perpetrators. Caesar, who turned up a few days later, apparently wept as he was presented with Pompey’s pickled head and shortly backed one of the rivals to the throne of Egypt. That rival was Queen Cleopatra VII, best known for her alliance, political and romantic, with Mark Antony in the next round of Roman civil wars. But at this point her interests lay with Caesar, with whom she had an open affair and – if her claims about paternity are to be believed – a child.

  Back in Rome, Caesar’s triumphal processions paraded spoils, animate and inanimate, from across the Roman world (see plate 9). His triumph of 46 BCE, celebrated during one of his brief visits to the city, displayed not only the Gallic rebel Vercingetorix but also Cleopatra’s half-sister, who had been on the wrong side of the Egyptian power struggles; she was put on show next to a working model of the lighthouse of Alexandria. Caesar’s victory over Mithradates’ son Pharnaces, who had died in battle near the Black Sea, was commemorated in the same celebrations by a single placard on which was written one of the world’s most famous slogans ever: ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, intended to capture the speed of Caesar’s success). But there were alarming signs too, in the images of Caesar’s Roman victims. Triumphal processions were supposed to celebrate victories over foreign enemies, not citizens of Rome. Caesar put on show shocking paintings of the dying moments of leading figures on the Pompeian side: from Cato disembowelling himself to Metellus Scipio throwing himself into the sea. The distaste of many people for this particular kind of triumphalism was registered in the tears of the crowds as these images were carried past. In retrospect, it was an uncanny foretaste of Caesar’s bloody fate less than two years later.