SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  The Ides of March

  Julius Caesar was murdered on 15 March 44 BCE, the Ides on the Roman dating system. In parts of the Mediterranean world the civil war had by no means ended. Pompey’s son Sextus still had a force of at least six legions in Spain and was continuing to fight for his father’s cause. But Caesar was mustering a vast force of almost 100,000 soldiers for an attack on the Parthian Empire, a revenge for the ignominious defeat of Crassus at Carrhae and a useful opportunity for military glory against a foreign rather than a Roman enemy. It was just a few days before he was due to leave for the East, on 18 March, that a group of twenty or so disgruntled senators, supported actively or passively by a few dozen more, killed him.

  Appropriately, the deed took place in a new senate house, which Pompey had built into his new theatre complex, in front of a statue of himself, which ended up splattered with Caesar’s blood. Thanks in part to the reworking of the theme in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the murder of the Roman dictator in the name of libertas has been the template for last-ditch opposition to tyranny and for principled assassination ever since. It was no coincidence, for example, that John Wilkes Booth used ‘Ides’ as the code for the day on which he planned to kill Abraham Lincoln. But as a backwards glance through Roman history shows, this was the last in a series of murders of popular, radical but arguably too powerful politicians that started with the lynching of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE. The question must be: what was Caesar trying to do and what made him so unacceptable to this group of senators that assassination seemed the only way out?

  Despite his rare appearances in Rome, Caesar initiated a vast programme of reforms going beyond even the scale of Sulla’s. One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping. The traditional Roman year was only 355 days long, and it had for centuries been the job of Roman priests to add in an extra month from time to time to keep the civic calendar in step with the natural seasons. For whatever reason – probably a combination of lack of expertise and lack of will – they had signally failed to get their calculations correct. The result was that the calendar year and the natural year were sometimes many weeks apart, with the Roman equivalent of harvest festivals falling when the crops were still growing and the climate in what was called April feeling more like February (which it was). The truth is that it is always dangerous in Republican history to assume that any given date is an accurate indication of the weather. Using Alexandrian know-how, Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.

  Other measures harked back to familiar themes from the previous hundred years. Caesar launched, for example, a large number of new overseas colonies to resettle the poor from the city of Rome, following up Gaius Gracchus’ initiative with a successful foundation at Carthage. It was this, presumably, that allowed him to get away with reducing the number of recipients of free grain by about half, to 150,000 in all. He also extended Roman citizenship to those living in the far north of Italy, beyond the river Po, and at least proposed granting Latin status to the population of Sicily. But he had even more ambitious plans to overhaul Roman government, including attempts to regularise – even micromanage – all kinds of aspects of civic organisation, both in Rome and throughout Italy. These ranged from questions of who could hold office in local Italian communities (no gravediggers, pimps, actors or auctioneers unless they were retired) to issues of road maintenance (householders to be responsible for the footpath in front of their house) and traffic management (no heavy-goods vehicles in Rome during the daytime except for the purposes of temple building or repair, or for removing demolition rubble).

  Caesar also became part of the calendar, as well as rewriting it. It may not have been until after his assassination that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius, our July, after him; Roman writers do not always make the chronology clear. But it was overweening honours of that sort, voted during his lifetime by a compliant senate, combined with his more or less official takeover of the democratic processes that provoked the deadly opposition. This went far beyond his head on the coinage. He was allowed to wear triumphal dress almost wherever he liked, including the triumphal laurel wreath, which he found convenient for disguising his bald patch. Temples and a priesthood in his honour seem to have been promised too, and his statue was placed in all the existing temples of Rome. His private house was even to be decorated with a triangular gable (or pediment), to give it the appearance of a temple, the home of a god.

  Almost worse within the Roman context were the strong hints that he was aiming at becoming a king. On one famous but rather murky occasion, just a month before his assassination, his loyal lieutenant and one of the consuls of the year, Mark Antony, used the religious festival of the Lupercalia to offer Caesar a royal crown. It was obviously a carefully choreographed piece of propaganda, and it may have been designed as a test of public opinion. Would the watching crowd cheer when Caesar was offered the crown or not? If it did, would that be a cue to accept? Even at the time, Caesar’s response and the overall message were disputed. Did he, as Cicero thought, ask Antony to send the crown to the Temple of Jupiter, the god who – Caesar insisted – was the only king of Rome? Or was it thrown to the audience and then put on a statue of Caesar? It was suspiciously unclear whether he was saying ‘No, thank you’ or ‘Yes, please’.

  Even if it was a ‘No, thank you’, his position as dictator, in various forms from 49 BCE, seemed pernicious to some. He was first appointed to the office for a short term, to conduct elections to the consulship for the next year, an entirely traditional procedure, except for the entirely untraditional fact that he oversaw the election of himself. In 48 BCE, after his victory at the Battle of Pharsalus, the senate again made him dictator for a year, and then in 46 BCE for ten years. Finally, by the start of 44 BCE he had become dictator for life: to the average observer, the difference between that and king must have been hard to discern. Under the terms of his dictatorship Caesar had the right directly to nominate some candidates for ‘election’, and he controlled the other elections behind the scenes more efficiently than Pompey had done with his notebook of future consuls’ names. At the end of 45 BCE he caused a particular stir when the death of one of the sitting consuls was announced on the very last day of the year. Caesar instantly convened an assembly to elect one of his friends, Caius Caninius Rebilus, to the vacant post for just half a day. This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinarily vigilant consul that ‘he never once went to sleep in his whole term of office’; ‘in the consulship of Caninius you may take it no one had breakfast’; ‘Who were the consuls when Caninius was consul?’ But Cicero was also outraged, as were many conservatives. For this was almost worse than fixing the elections; it was not taking the elected offices of the Roman Republic seriously.

  What might now appear to be Caesar’s best quality was, ironically, the one most flagrantly at odds with Republican tradition. He made much of his clementia, or mercy. He pardoned rather than punished his enemies, and he made a display of renouncing cruel retribution against fellow Romans, provided they gave up their opposition to him (Cato, Metellus Scipio and most Gauls were quite another matter, and deserved all they got). Caesar had pardoned several of his future assassins, Brutus among them, after they had fought on the Pompeian side in the civil war. In many ways, clementia was the political slogan of Caesar’s dictatorship. Yet it provoked as much opposition as gratitude, for the simple reason that, virtue though it may have been in some respects, it was an entirely monarchical one. Only those with the power to do otherwise can exercise mercy. Clementia, in other words, was the antithesis of Republican libertas. Cato was said to have killed himself to escape it.

  So it was not just a case
of simple ingratitude when Brutus and the others turned on the man who had given them a second chance. It was partly that. It was partly motivated by self-interest and disgruntlement, driven by the assassins’ sense of dignitas. But they were also defending one view of liberty and one view of the importance of Republican traditions going back, in Rome’s mythology, to the moment when Brutus’ distant ancestor was instrumental in expelling the Tarquins and became one of the first pair of consuls. In fact, the design of a silver coin later issued by the assassins underscores that very point, by featuring the distinctive hat – the pileus, or cap of liberty – that slaves wore when they were granted their freedom. The message was that the Roman people had been liberated.

  48. A silver coin issued by the ‘liberators’ of Rome the year after the assassination of Caesar (43–42 BCE). One side celebrates the freedom won: the pileus, worn by newly freed slaves, is flanked by the daggers that did the deed, and underneath is the famous date EID MAR (the ‘Ides of March’, that is 15 March). On the other side, the head of Brutus himself implies a rather different message. The portrayal of a living person on a Roman coin was taken as a sign of autocratic power.

  Or had they? As we shall see, it turned out to be a very odd sort of freedom. If the assassination of Julius Caesar became a model for the effective removal of a tyrant, it was also a powerful reminder that getting rid of a tyrant did not necessarily dispose of tyranny. Despite all the slogans, the bravado and the high principles, what the assassins actually brought about, and what the people got, was a long civil war and the permanent establishment of one-man rule. But that is the story of Chapter 9. First we must turn to some of the equally important aspects of the history of Rome that lay behind the politics and the headlines.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ·

  THE HOME FRONT

  Public and private

  ONE SIDE OF the history of Rome is a history of politics, of war, of victory and defeat, of citizenship and of everything that went on in public between prominent men. I have outlined one dramatic version of that history, as Rome transformed from a small, unimpressive town next to the Tiber into first a local and eventually an international power base. Almost every aspect of that transformation was contested and sometimes literally fought over: the rights of the people against the senate, the questions of what liberty meant and how it was to be guaranteed, the control that was, or was not, to be exercised over conquered territory, the impact of empire, for good or bad, on traditional Roman politics and values. In the process, a version of citizenship was somehow invented that was new in the classical world. Greeks had occasionally shared citizenship, on an ad hoc basis, between two cities. But the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places – to count two places as home – was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has proved influential right up into the twenty-first century. This was a Roman revolution, and we are its heirs.

  There are nevertheless some elusive sides to this story. It is only occasionally possible to discover the part in the grand narrative of Roman history up to the first century BCE that ordinary people, the women, the poor or the slaves played. We have found just a few cameo appearances: the frightened comedian on the stage at Asculum, the loud-mouthed servant who unwisely abused the supporters of Gaius Gracchus, the eunuch priest who worried about his friend in the civil war, even the poor cat trapped in the fire that destroyed the hut at Fidenae. There is much more evidence for all these groups in later periods, and they figure more prominently in the rest of this book. But what survives for the early centuries of Roman history tends to offer a one-sided picture of the priorities even of the elite Roman man. It is easy to get the impression that the main characters in the story were concerned with the big issues of Roman political power to the exclusion of anything else, as if the proud conquests, military prowess and election to political office that are blazoned on their tombstones were the be-all and end-all of their existence.

  They were not. We have already glimpsed a few other aspects of their lives and interests, enjoying boy-meets-girl comedies on the stage, writing and learning poetry and listening to literary lectures given by visiting Greek ambassadors. It is not hard to imagine something of the day-to-day world of Polybius in Rome, as he pondered on the funerals he attended or shrewdly decided to claim sickness on the day a fellow hostage made his escape attempt. Nor is it hard to recapture something of the fun that the elder Cato must have had thinking up his stunt with the Carthaginian figs dropping out of his toga. But it is only in the first century BCE that we begin to have rich evidence for all the things that preoccupied the Roman elite beyond war and politics.

  These range from curiosity about the language they spoke (one prolific scholar devoted twenty-five books to a history of Latin, its grammar and etymology) to intense scientific speculation on the origins of the universe and theological debate on the nature of the gods. The eloquent discussion of the folly of fearing death by Titus Lucretius Carus, in his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), is one of the highlights of classical literature and a beacon of good sense even now (those who do not exist cannot regret their nonexistence, as part of the argument runs). But by far the most sustained insight into the interests, concerns, pleasures, fears and problems of one notable Roman comes from the thousand or so private letters to and from Cicero that were collected, edited and made public after his death in 43 BCE and have been read and studied ever since.

  They contain, as we have seen, plenty of gossip from the highest echelons of Roman politics, and they throw rare light on the front line of provincial government as Cicero experienced it in Cilicia. But no less important, they reveal what else was claiming Cicero’s attention while he was facing down Catiline, dealing with the Gang of Three, planning military strikes on troublesome locals or deciding where his loyalties lay in civil war. Alongside those political and military crises, at the same time he was worrying about money, dowries and marriages (his daughter’s and his own), grieving at the death of those he loved, divorcing his wife, complaining about an upset stomach after an unusual menu at dinner, attempting to track down runaway slaves and trying to acquire some nice statues to decorate one of his many houses. For the first, and almost the only, time in Roman history these letters allow us to take a close look at what was going on behind one Roman front door.

  This chapter follows up some of those themes in Cicero’s letters. We will start with his experience of civil war and of the dictatorship of Julius Caesar – by turns messy and darkly funny, and about as far from the ringing public slogans of libertas and clementia as you could imagine – then move on to some fundamental questions that can get lost in all the political controversies, diplomatic negotiations and military campaigns. How long did Romans expect to live? At what age did people get married? What rights did women have? Where did the money come from to support the lavish lifestyles of the rich and privileged? And what about the slaves?

  The other sides of civil war

  In 49 BCE, after many weeks of indecision and despite his realistic sense that there was not much to choose between Caesar and Pompey, Cicero decided not to remain neutral in the civil war but to join the Pompeians and sail for their camp in northern Greece. Although not quite in the league of either of the protagonists, he was still a significant enough figure that neither side wanted him as a declared enemy. But some of his irritating habits made Cicero an unpopular member of Pompey’s squad. His fellow fighters could not stand the way he went around the barracks with a scowl on his face while trying to relieve the tension by cracking feeble jokes. ‘So why not employ him as guardian of your children, then?’ he retorted when a decidedly inappropriate candidate was promoted to a command position on the grounds that he was ‘mild mannered and sensible’. When the day of the Battle of Pharsalus came, Cicero used Polybius’ tactic and was conveniently off sick. After the defeat, rather than move on from Greece to Africa with some of the hardliners, he r
eturned directly to Italy to wait for an amnesty from Caesar.

  Cicero’s letters from this period, about 400 in all, reveal something of the tawdriness and the terror of civil war, as well as the disorganisation, the misunderstanding, the back-stabbing, the personal ambitions, even the bathos of this, or any, conflict and its aftermath. They offer a useful antidote to Caesar’s artfully partisan Commentaries on the Civil War, written to match his Commentaries on the Gallic War, and to some of the high-flown rhetoric and big principles that the clash between Caesarians and Pompeians still evokes. Civil war had its seedy side too.

  Part of Cicero’s indecision in 49 BCE was caused not by political ambivalence but by almost farcical ambition. He had only just returned from Cilicia and was keen for the senate to award him a triumph to celebrate his successful skirmish in the province a year earlier, and the rules demanded that he neither enter the city nor dismiss his official staff until the decision on the award had been made. He was anxious about his family and uncertain whether his wife and daughter should remain in Rome. Could they be useful to him there? Would there be enough food for them? Would it give the wrong impression for them to stay in the city when other rich women were leaving? In any case, if he was to stand a chance of a triumph, he had little option but to spend a few months traipsing around outside Rome, increasingly inconvenienced and embarrassed by his detachment of official bodyguards, who were still carrying the drooping laurel leaves that he had been awarded to celebrate his little victory. Eventually he accepted the inevitable: the senators had more pressing matters on their minds than his ‘bauble’, as he sometimes called it; he would give up any hope of a triumph and join Pompey.