The Book of Ancient Bastards

by Thornton, Brian

  Quotable Bastard

  Caesar’s ambition was hardly a secret, and hardly unique in ancient Rome. But others did note that Caesar was ambitious even by Roman standards. His political rival Marcus Tullius Cicero once famously remarked to him: “Your spirit has never been content within the narrow confines which nature has imposed upon us.”

  38

  MARCUS PORCIUS

  CATO UTICENSIS

  The Bastard as Tiresome, Humorless Scold

  (95–46 B.C.)

  The conquering cause pleased the gods,

  but the conquered cause pleased Cato.

  —Lucan, Pharsalia

  Look up the word “contrary” in the dictionary, and you’re likely to see this guy’s picture next to it. Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (known to historians as “Cato the Younger” to distinguish him from his famous forbear of the same name) was a stubborn, silver-spoon-sucking son of an old-old-old family. Cato the Elder had distinguished himself by acting as Rome’s conscience in her decades-long struggle with Carthage (or as a tiresome, moralistic scold, depending on your point of view). The younger Cato grew up intent on “out-Catoing” his ancestor.

  In this, he was, by and large, successful. Caesar himself once wondered aloud why someone like Cato, who, never bothering to go abroad to conquer territory or fight to suppress the Republic’s enemies, felt entitled to look down his nose in judgment at someone like Caesar.

  But Cato seems to have been capable of “out-arroganting” ancient Roman aristocrats! Time and again he would stake out the moral high ground, set himself up as the defender of what was right, and heap scorn on friend and foe alike. And the Romans thanked him for it.

  Although this sort of virtue was easy to admire, it was another thing to like it. Cato got a free pass from most ancient historians who didn’t know him personally (especially Plutarch) because of their admiration for his unbending adherence to his principles. But their uncritical acceptance of Cato as the arbiter of what was right and proper does nothing to hide the bald fact that Cato frequently set himself up as the moral authority of his country as a political tool to help in his goal of turning back the clock, keeping the common people (especially the urban poor) in their place, without caring about the cost.

  In the end, Cato succeeded in manipulating Pompey into turning on Caesar. But no amount of moral fiber nor stubborn willfulness could make Pompey a better general than Caesar, and Cato and the rest of the optimates party who supported the “Great” Pompey were beaten along with him.

  Even in defeat, Cato proved contrary. Refusing Caesar’s generous offer to let him off the hook for opposing him, Cato embraced martyrdom, stabbing himself to death, something he’d been preparing for his whole life, the end of which he used as a final moral statement.

  Contrary bastard.

  Profiteering Bastard?

  So Hortensius, an old rich guy in his sixties, tried to get Cato to agree to let him marry Cato’s daughter so that he could form a strong alliance with Cato’s honorable family, and Cato refused. Hortensius, worried about not having an heir, asked Cato to divorce his wife Marcia instead, so that she might then be married to Hortensius and bear him an heir, which Cato did and which Marcia did. After Hortensius died a few years later, Cato took Marcia back into his household. A guy can be a moral force and still come across as a bit of a nut!

  39

  MARCUS JUNIUS BRUTUS

  The Noblest Roman Tax Farmer

  of Them All

  (85–42 B.C.)

  Caesar does not prevent me from acting according to the laws, nor will he prevent me.

  —Marcus Junius Brutus

  Everyone knows the story of Marcus Brutus, that “noblest Roman of them all,” a man of unquestioned character, who was good friends with Julius Caesar but helped kill him because he loved the Republic more.

  This man of unquestioned character, descended from the near-legendary Brutus who’d chased the last king out of Rome 450 years earlier, actually made his money as a loan shark. Working on the island of Cyprus shortly after it transitioned from client kingdom to Roman territory, Brutus extended loans to people desperate for cash—at an interest rate of 48 percent!

  Charging interest at this usurious rate was illegal, but Brutus got an exemption (in part because he was screwing the provincials, not Roman citizens). Within a very short time, Brutus had become an extremely wealthy man.

  He had need of the money. His father had been executed on Pompey’s orders during Sulla’s proscriptions, and the family’s possessions had been confiscated by the state.

  While all proscription executions carried the stink of murder with them, the killing of the elder Marcus Brutus was particularly rank because he was taken out and killed (likely strangled) after he had surrendered himself to Pompey’s backers, as part of a negotiated deal in which his life was to have been spared. Understandably, the younger Brutus did not take this well; yet, when Pompey and Caesar faced off over the question of which political party’s senate representatives would run Rome, Caesar’s populares, or Pompey and the conservative optimates, Brutus doesn’t seem to have hesitated. He surprised nearly everyone by siding with Pompey. Historians down the ages have hailed this move as a noble act of putting aside personal interests in the name of patriotism, but they’re wrong. Brutus wasn’t putting aside his personal interests. He was a rich, wealthy, respected member of the aristocracy who sided with other rich, wealthy members of the aristocracy against that ultimate traitor to his class, Gaius Julius Caesar. How is it patriotic to uphold the old order that benefits you most?

  On top of that, after Caesar famously pardoned Brutus, Brutus did what? He joined a plot to assassinate the very man to whom he owed his safety and his own recent advancement (he’d been appointed city praetor by Caesar). When Brutus fell on his own sword after losing the battle of Philippi, he did the most patriotic thing he’d ever done.

  Bastard’s Son?

  Brutus’s mother, the formidable Servilia Caepoinis, was the longtime mistress of none other than Gaius Julius Caesar. Ancient historians speculated that Caesar was actually the young Brutus’s father, but Caesar likely didn’t take up with Servilia until after Brutus was born (Caesar was only fifteen at the time). Caesar sure treated him like a son, though. When Brutus sided with the senate and Pompey against him, Caesar insisted that none of his troops were to fight with Brutus if they encountered him on the battlefield, and he later accepted the young man into his circle of intimates with no penalty for having taken sides against him. Think maybe Caesar was trying to score points with his girlfriend’s kid?

  40

  GAIUS CASSIUS LONGINUS

  “Lean and Hungry” Bastard

  (CA. 85–42 B.C.)

  In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

  —Gaius Cassius Longinus

  The guy that Shakespeare would describe centuries later as having a “lean and hungry look” knew a thing or two about failure. Between having an older brother whose track record of corruption kept him from getting elected consul, and his own adventures during Crassus’s disastrous campaign against the Parthians in 53 B.C., Cassius had witnessed failure on an epic scale by the time he became a leading opponent of Julius Caesar.

  And yet, just like the Bard wrote, Cassius was in many ways the spirit behind the conspiracy to kill Caesar. Never mind that the ever-magnanimous Caesar had pardoned Cassius for backing Caesar’s rival Pompey. In fact, owing his life to Caesar seems to have sharpened Cassius’s resolve to see him sacrificed on the altar of republican values.

  When Caesar began selecting men of ability for various praetorships (magistracies) throughout the Republic’s territories, including the coveted city praetorship of Rome itself, Cassius, eminently qualified for this position, found himself in competition with his brother-in-law, Marcus Brutus, for it. Caesar conceded that Cassius was the more qualified, but either because of outright favoritism or because he had reason to distrust Cassius, Caesar choose Brutus for the positi
on. It was at this point that Cassius began plotting against Caesar.

  This made him a hypocrite, because while he claimed to his co-conspirators to be protecting the Republic, his actual reason for plotting against Caesar was malice.

  Somehow Cassius managed to pull it off; he succeeded in inveigling the more highly regarded Brutus into his plot, attaching Brutus’s name (and consequently the names of a whole bunch of people with better reputations than Cassius’s own) to it. After they had killed Caesar, it was Brutus who insisted that the life of Marcus Antonius be spared—Cassius wanted the playboy dead, saying that Brutus had underestimated him.

  As it turned out, Cassius was right.

  What followed were two years of jockeying for power between Antonius and Caesar’s heir Octavian and their adherents on one side, and Brutus, Cassius, and the other conspirators (and their followers) on the other. It all came to a head at the battle of Philippi in Greece in late 42 B.C. Brutus succeeded in defeating Octavian’s troops and forcing his retreat, but Cassius lost in a separate engagement to the hated Antonius. Determined not to be taken alive, Cassius committed suicide with the help of a devoted freedman, Pindarus. Brutus would soon follow him in death, and with them went the Republic for which they’d killed Caesar.

  Bastard-in-Law

  Cassius was the half-brother of Marcus Brutus’s wife, making Brutus Cassius’s brother-in-law. And according to the biographer Plutarch, Cassius suffered by the inevitable comparison. Caesar’s supporters, Plutarch wrote, “laid whatever was barbarous and cruel [about the conspiracy to kill Caesar] to the charge of Cassius,” who was “not [Brutus’s] equal in honesty and pureness of purpose.”

  41

  MARCUS ANTONIUS

  Dandy, Playboy, Ruthless Bastard

  (CA. 86–30 B.C.)

  He was too lazy to pay attention to the complaints of persons who were injured; he listened impatiently to petitions; and he had an ill name for familiarity with other people’s wives.

  —Plutarch, Life of Antony

  The image of Marcus Antonius (also known as “Marc Antony”) that has come down to us through the ages is a complicated one. By turns industrious and lazy, open-handed and murderous, Antonius had a reputation as both a maker of trouble and a maker of deals. In the end, neither his considerable talents nor his equally considerable faults made much difference. He crossed the buzz saw that was Octavian, and paid for it.

  Born into a well-connected family, Antonius was a distant cousin of the strong- man Gaius Julius Caesar. His grandfather was a great orator who was killed during Marius’s and Cinna’s proscriptions. His father was an undistinguished public official who died while Antonius was young. His mother remarried, this time to Publius Cornelius Lentulus, a politician who was eventually executed for his part in Catiline’s conspiracy (an act for which Antonius never forgave Cicero, the consul who exposed Catiline’s plot and saw to it that the ringleaders were put to death).

  Antonius quickly developed a reputation as a good soldier and a careless administrator, a spendthrift who was 5 million dollars (in today’s money) in debt before he turned twenty-five, and a good-time party boy who was great at taking orders (especially Caesar’s). Little wonder that so many of his opponents underestimated him.

  After Caesar was murdered, Antonius spent the next fourteen years alternately at odds and allied with Caesar’s heir, Octavian. Eventually they agreed to an alliance wherein they split the Roman world between them and sealed the bargain with Antonius’s marriage to Octavian’s sister, Octavia. The two were soon at odds again, when Antonius threw over his wife for a very public affair with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.

  The outcome shouldn’t really have been in doubt. Antonius pretty much lost his head over his new girlfriend (who had been Caesar’s before him–Antonius always wanted to be Caesar), at her urging deeding their children huge territories carved out of Roman conquests in the eastern Mediterranean. The result was outrage in Rome and a climactic naval battle at Actium in 31 B.C. between Cleopatra’s fleet and Octavian’s navy. Within a matter of weeks, both Antonius and Cleopatra had committed suicide.

  And those children that Antonius tried to provide for? They were sent to Rome, where Antonius’s widow Octavia (he had never bothered to divorce her) raised them as her own.

  A Bastard Threesome

  According to contemporary accounts, Antonius screwed his way through half the available women in Rome, and frequently didn’t stop at women. One of Antonius’s boyfriends was a guy named Gaius Scribonius Curio, whom he’d known and partied with since his teen years. When Curio died, Antonius almost immediately married his widow, Fulvia, who bore him a son. Theirs was more than just a political alliance (although it was clearly that as well), and although Antonius was never faithful to Fulvia, they were clearly devoted to each other. The historian Cassius Dio reports that when Antonius managed to get his lifelong enemy Cicero executed, Fulvia had the great orator’s severed head brought to her so she could stab that previously eloquent tongue with her knitting needles!

  42

  GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR OCTAVIANUS AUGUSTUS

  Sage Old Bastard Who Died in Bed, Redux

  (63 B.C.– A.D. 14)

  You, boy, owe everything to your name.

  —Marcus Antonius to Octavian, 43 b.c.

  If ever a man was both right and wrong at the same time, it was Marcus Antonius when he made the above statement. While it was true that Octavian, then barely out of his teens, was rich because he was the adopted son and heir of Gaius Julius Caesar, what Antonius failed to comprehend was that Octavian possessed reserves of both guile and resolve that Antonius at his dilettante best could not possibly hope to match. Their relationship, begun in barely tolerated loathing wedded to mutual self-interest, culminated in Antonius’s downfall and death in 30 B.C. and Octavian’s consolidation of power in the Mediterranean world as the first emperor of Rome.

  Octavian’s father died when he was little, and after his mother’s remarriage she and his stepfather paid little attention to the boy. His great-uncle Gaius Julius Caesar took an interest in both his upbringing and his education. Every bit as shrewd as his illustrious relative, Octavian was possessed of a far less forgiving nature. Caesar was famous for his willingness to forgive and pardon his enemies. Not so Octavian.

  During his lifetime, he exiled his only child, his daughter Julia, on charges of treason and adultery (by all reports, of the two she is certain to have committed the adultery, many, many times). During the bloody proscriptions that followed Caesar’s murder, the young Octavian, who had developed a relationship with fellow bastard Cicero so warm that he called the older man “father,” agreed with Marcus Antonius that Cicero must be killed. After the defeat and suicides of Antonius and Cleopatra, Octavian’s forces took over Egypt, and when Cleopatra’s children fell into his power, he had his own cousin (Julius Caesar’s son Caesarion) killed, although the boy was only sixteen. He did the same with Antonius’s eldest son (and heir), seventeen-year-old Antyllus, brutally beheading him in front of his legions.

  What’s in a Bastard’s Name?

  Born Gaius Octavius Thurinus in 63 B.C. the boy was named after his most esteemed relative: Caesar, his grandmother’s brother. When Caesar adopted him, his name became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. He preferred to be called “Caesar” after that point, not just because it was a powerful political reminder of his connection to his great-uncle, but because he barely knew his own father and heartily disliked his stepfather. After he had held supreme power for decades, the senate voted him the title (not name) Augustus, which in Latin means “honored,” or “revered.” We get our word “august” from it. The senate also renamed the month of Sextilis in the old Roman calendar “August” after him.

  Although during his long life and political career he cultivated a public image of a modest man, uninterested in holding power himself except as it was delegated to him by the senate, Octavian proved a most ruthless man: taking on the Roman state and using his
personal popularity, the enormous wealth his great-uncle had left him in his will, and his considerable political skills to convert the anarchic late Republic into a smooth running dictatorship called “the Principate.” During this entire time, Octavian never allowed himself to be referred to in public as anything other than “Caesar,” claiming he was nothing more than a sort of “First Among Citizens,” doing his duty to his country.

  In reality, Octavian controlled the levers of power in the Roman state until he died in his bed at age seventy-six. This was the man who was fond of boasting: “I found Rome brick and left her marble,” speaking of his building programs. But what he really did was find Rome chaotic and leave her orderly.

  A task that requires a wide streak of bastardry!

  43

  LIVIA DRUSILLA

  Stage Mother for an Empire

  (58 B.C.– A.D. 29)

  In domestic virtue she was of the old school, though her affability went further than was approved by women of the elder world. An imperious mother, she was an accommodating wife, and an excellent match for the subtleties of her husband and the insincerity of her son.

  —Tacitus, The Annals

  Livia Drusilla, the wife of Rome’s first emperor, fellow bastard Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Augustus), comes down to us through the millennia as an opaque figure at best. Every bit as capable of playing a role with all the sincerity of her nearly matchless husband, Livia made a point of playing the doting wife and caring mother in public, embracing the traditional role of the virtuous Roman matron, consumed with hearth and home, leaving business and politics to “her men.”

  In reality, she was a political player and behind-the-scenes power broker, one of only two people her husband seems to have trusted during his entire long life (the other being his lifelong friend and son-in-law, Marcus Agrippa). Livia made use of that trust to influence the emperor (and others) in favor of her sons: the scholarly, moody military man Tiberius and his younger brother, the brilliant, likeable Drusus.