One of the most notorious training schools for gladiators was in the city of Capua, south of Rome, where a gladiator master kept a whole assortment of slaves cooped up. “Most of them were Gauls and Thracians,” Plutarch writes. “They had done nothing wrong, but, simply because of the cruelty of their owner, were kept in close confinement until the time came for them to engage in combat.”3 In 73, seventy-eight of these gladiators managed to break out of their quarters. They raided a nearby butcher’s shop for knives and spits and headed out of the city. When troops came after them from Capua, the gladiators polished them off and took their weapons away.
This was the beginning of a fight that would go on for more than two years, and earned the title of the Gladiator War.221 The gladiators elected as their leader a man named Spartacus; Plutarch says that he was a Thracian “from the nomadic tribes,” but “most intelligent and cultured, being more like a Greek than a Thracian.” (This was by way of a compliment.) He turned out to be a brilliant strategist. Three thousand Roman soldiers were sent out against the gladiators, and drove them up a mountain where there were only two routes of escape: through a pass guarded by the Romans, and down a steep cliff-face on the other side. But the ground was covered with wild vines. Under Spartacus’s direction, the trapped gladiators cut them up and made them into ladders, which they dropped to the bottom of the cliff and scrambled down. Then they went around to where the Romans were camping, totally unprepared, and took the whole camp.4
After this, they routed several other Roman assault forces sent out against them, and began to gain a greater and greater opinion of their own strength. According to Appian, Spartacus’s army grew to seventy thousand men, and the Romans had to entirely change their opinion about the contest: “Ridiculous and contemptible in the beginning,” Appian says, the war had become “formidable to Rome.”5
Spartacus, who apparently just wanted to go home, tried to convince them to turn their backs on Rome and march up through the Alps, where they could then scatter to their homelands of Thrace and Gaul. But they would not listen: “They were strong in numbers,” Plutarch says, “and full of confidence, and they went about Italy ravaging everything in their way.”6
This alarmed the Senate to such a degree that both consuls were sent out against the gladiator army. When both failed, the Senate appointed Sulla’s junior lieutenant Crassus to the job of wiping out the revolt. His first foray against Spartacus ended with an ignoble Roman retreat; with the ruthlessness that characterized Sulla’s associates, Crassus pulled out the five hundred foot soldiers who had been at the forefront of the flight and put fifty of them to death by lottery, while the rest of the army watched: a vicious punishment known as “decimation.”
This had the intended effect of strengthening them for the next encounter. Spartacus was driven back towards the coast, where he made arrangements with a pirate fleet to ferry his army over to Sicily. However, the pirates took his money and then sailed away, leaving him standing on the shore at Rhegium, the very tip of the Italian boot.
This meant that his army was on a little peninsula, and Crassus ordered his men to build a wall across the neck of the peninsula, with a fifteen-foot ditch in front of it. Spartacus was trapped, but not for long; when a snowstorm descended on the two armies, he filled up part of the ditch with dirt, logs, and tree branches, and got a good part of his army out of it and away.
At this point the Romans back home decided that Crassus needed help: Appian says that the Senate “ordered up the army of Pompey, which had just arrived from Spain, as a reinforcement.”7 Crassus redoubled his efforts, desperately hoping to finish the war before his colleague (and competitor) Pompey should arrive to steal some of the glory. “A number of people were already loudly proclaiming that victory in this war belonged to Pompey,” Plutarch writes; “it only remained for him to come and fight a battle, they said, and the war would be over.”8 Crassus was preparing for a last assault when Spartacus’s men, who had been ruined by success (they were so overconfident that they no longer paid any attention to their general), made an ill-timed and badly judged attack on the Roman lines. The Roman troops were finally able to turn the attack back. Most of the gladiators fled; Spartacus himself, making straight for Crassus, was deserted by his fellows and killed.
Unfortunately for Crassus, Pompey had just arrived. He caught and killed many of the fleeing slaves as they ran past him. Six thousand of them, captured alive, were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome; the crosses stretched almost the entire length of the Appian Way.9 Most people saw this as a monument to Pompey, not Crassus, which Pompey himself encouraged by sending a letter to the Senate saying that while Crassus had managed to win a battle, he himself had “dug the war up by the roots.”10
The following year, 70 BC, both Crassus and Pompey were elected as consuls. Plutarch says that they quarrelled the whole time and got nothing done, but they made themselves popular with the people by giving out grain.11 They were increasingly seen as champions of the common man; and for a little while, it must have seemed to the Roman voters as though the aristocratic control and corruption that had plagued Rome were finally on the wane. Crassus’s shady moneymaking strategies were in abeyance; Pompey’s biggest flaw was his propensity to claim credit for things that others had done. And another young politician, Cicero, was campaigning against senatorial corruption with zeal; in 70 BC, he prosecuted and convicted the aristocrat Verres of corruption, and the man was unable to escape.
78.1. Pompey. Pompey the Great, 106–48 BC. Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Photo credit Alinari/Art Resource, NY
So when piracy in the Mediterranean became a major problem, it seemed reasonable for the tribunes, representing the people, to suggest that Pompey be given the task of wiping it out. He would be given temporary command of a huge military force, which included not only all Roman ships in the Mediterranean but also over a hundred thousand Roman troops, in order to tackle the problem.12 The Senate, disliking so much power concentrated in the hands of one man, objected; but the Assembly voted to approve Pompey’s appointment.
His success was drastic and enormous and made him increasingly popular. His family was rapidly rising to become one of the most powerful in Rome; in fact, Julius Caesar (who had returned to Rome after Sulla’s death) asked to marry his daughter Pompeia. Pompey agreed to the wedding, and immediately set off again on campaign. After his triumph against the pirates, he had been awarded command of the ongoing fight against Pontus in the east.
In 66, Pompey brought a quick end to this war and then swept down along the coast of the Mediterranean and conquered the Syrian holdings of the fading Seleucid empire. In Jerusalem, he went into the temple for a quick look, even sticking his head into the Holy of Holies. This shocked the priests, but they were reconciled to the heathen invasion when Pompey gave them control of the city. Under this new arrangement, Jerusalem would be part of the Roman province of Palestine, and would no longer have a Hasmonean king. Instead, Pompey appointed a priest named John Hyrcanus (known as Hyrcanus II) to be “High Priest and Ethnarch,” a combined religious and secular office. The priests would run Palestine for Rome, and would report to a Roman governor who had charge over all of Syria, Rome’s newest acquisition.
78.1 The Wars of Pompey and Caesar
And then Pompey went home covered with glory.
BACK IN ROME, both Caesar and Cicero were rising in the political firmament. Cicero had been elected consul in 63, in a startling departure from tradition; it had been thirty years since a new man (a novus homo, from a family where no man had ever been consul before) had been appointed to the office. Julius Caesar too had been elected to two high-profile public offices: he became a financial official, an aedile, in 65, and Pontifex Maximus (high priest of the state religion) in 63.222 Unfortunately, he ran so deeply into debt campaigning that by the end of his term as Pontifex Maximus, he was in danger of being arrested for unpaid bills. He needed to leave Rome, and he needed to make some money. He managed to get h
imself appointed to the governorship of Hispania, the Roman province on the Iberian peninsula, but his creditors caught him at the ports and tried to confiscate his luggage.
Crassus, who was a good businessman—he owned silver mines, huge tracts of farmland, and enough slaves to work it all—guaranteed Caesar’s debts for him, and the creditors agreed to let him go.13 Crassus was a good judge of men. In Hispania, Caesar made enough money to pay off the creditors and was able to return to Rome. Once there, he called together Pompey (the popular conqueror) and Crassus (the prosperous businessman) and suggested that the three of them have a private arrangement. If they would give him enough public support and money to make his run for the consulship of 59 a success, once he was in power he would push for whatever laws they wanted.
Pompey was willing; he wanted extra benefits for the veterans in his army. Crassus was harder to convince. He was still peeved by Pompey’s self-glorification after the Gladiator War, and he did not trust Pompey now. (When he first heard Pompey’s nickname, “Pompey the Great,” he snorted and asked, “As great as what?”)14 However, he could see the advantages of having Caesar press for new financial regulations that would benefit his business, rather than doing so himself, and eventually the triumvirate of politicians agreed on their three-way deal. Caesar also broke his daughter’s engagement and offered her to Pompey, who was almost a quarter-century her senior and had already been married three times. Pompey agreed, and the wedding cemented the alliance.223
The campaign succeeded, and Caesar became consul. At once he introduced all sorts of measures to redistribute land to the poor. This made him extremely unpopular with his fellow consul Bibulus and with the Senate, which did not like to see a consul behaving like a tribune and championing the cause of the masses. (“This was a lowering of his great office,” Plutarch sniffs.) The masses were pleased, though; the Assembly approved Caesar’s measures, and Pompey sent armed men to the Forum to make sure that the Senators did not interfere. Bibulus himself got a bucket of manure dumped on his head when he came down to the Forum to object. After that, Plutarch says, he “shut himself up in his house and stayed there for the rest of his term of office.”15
When his year as consul was over, Caesar (with the help of Pompey’s armed men) got himself appointed as governor of “Transalpine Gaul,” the western part of the province on the other side of the Alps (the eastern portion was known as “Cisalpine Gaul”). Here he set about building himself a reputation as a conqueror that would rival Pompey’s own. First he pushed back the Celtic tribes of the Helvetii and the Tigurini, who were trying to invade Transalpine Gaul; then he took the war into the enemy territory, towards the Rhine river, against the tribes known collectively as “Germans.” Taking a lesson from Pompey, he also made sure that the Romans back home knew about every single victory; he sent back constant reports on how well he was doing, always couched in terms of gains for the Republic. “On the receipt of the dispatches in Rome,” he wrote, in his own history of his Gallic wars, “a public thanks-giving of fifteen days was decreed to celebrate [my] achievements—a greater honor than had previously been granted to anyone.”22416
Meanwhile he was keeping a thumb in affairs at home. He came down into Italy as far as the Rubicon river, which was considered to be the northern border of Italy proper, and built himself a satellite camp at the city of Luca. From there, Plutarch says, he “employed his time in political intrigues,” and handed out plenty of bribes: “Many people came to see him…everyone left him with something in hand for the present and with hopes for more in the future.”17
In 56, two of those travellers were Crassus and Pompey, who came to work out the next stage of their three-way alliance. They decided that Crassus and Pompey would run for the consulship of 55; once they were in power, they would award Caesar another five years in Gaul, so that he could go on extending his power there. Then, after the consulships ended, Crassus would make himself general of an expedition to the east against the Parthians, now the strongest power on the other side of the Mediterranean, which would give him a chance for the military glory which had so far eluded him. Pompey, who was done with fighting, would give himself the governorship of Hispania and, like Caesar, make a profit from it.
With this agreement sealed, Pompey and Crassus went back to Rome. The Roman public was still suspicious of both of them, but neither one intended to leave the election to fair means. After an amount of vote-buying which exceeded any bribery ever seen before in Rome, they were both appointed to the consulship for the second time, fifteen years after their first term of service. The Senate duly voted to extend Caesar’s command: “It was a question of compulsion,” Plutarch notes, “and the senate groaned at the decrees for which it voted.”18
But the people were still on Caesar’s side: Caesar the compassionate, Caesar the all-conquering. The Triumvirate had succeeded again. They were poised, as far as all three were all concerned, on the very edge of glory and wealth beyond their wildest dreams.
AS SOON AS the two consuls had taken office, Caesar launched a new offensive, against a brand-new frontier. In 55, he landed on the southeast coast of Britain for the first time for a reconnaissance.
The inhabitants of this part of Britain were a mixture of the earliest residents of the island, perhaps living there since the days when Britain had been a peninsula instead of an island, and Celts who had moved west from the European mainland across the channel. In Britain, these tribes didn’t have the space to be nomadic; they settled down into a network of little tribal kingdoms. What we know of them comes from Caesar’s own account and, in distorted form, from a much later history: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannia, which combines Roman and medieval place names with Welsh legend, a thin thread of fact, and a strong patriotic bent (“Britain, the best island, is situated in the western sea between Gaul and Hibernia,” he begins, showing his Roman orientation).19
The history starts out with the very unlikely story of a great-grandson of Aeneas, Brutus, setting out on an expedition and stumbling upon the island, which he named Britain after himself. This obligatory linking of British history with ancient myth is followed by Geoffrey’s account of the earliest kings of Britain.225 Prominent in this story is one Cassivelaunus, whom Geoffrey of Monmouth calls “king of the Britains,” but who appears in Julius Caesar’s account as a rogue warrior who usurped the throne of the Trinovantes tribe.
78.2 Britain
Pieced together, Monmouth and Caesar suggest that the king of the Trinovantes, King Lud, had managed to make the Trinovantes one of the most powerful tribal kingdoms of the south; he was best known for expanding and walling in the main settlement on the river Thames, which became known as Lundres in his honor. When Lud died, his brother Cassivelaunus claimed the throne over the head of Lud’s own son. The displaced prince, Mandubracius, fled across the water to Caesar’s headquarters in Gaul and asked the Romans to help him get his kingdom back. Like most kings who asked for Roman intervention, he would regret it later.
On his first visit, Caesar evaluated the opposition. (“All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue color,” he wrote on his return, “and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and the upper lip.”)20 The following year, 54, he returned with a fighting force to take over.
Cassivelaunus came out to meet him with a fleet of chariots, the first time Caesar and his men had encountered these in war. Fighting against charioteers demanded a swift change in tactics: “It was seen that our troops were too heavily weighted by their armour to deal with such an enemy,” Caesar observes, especially since the British charioteers were able to leap down from the chariots, fight on foot, and then make a quick retreat: “They can run along the chariot pole, stand on the yoke, and get back into the chariot as quick as lightning.”21 Caesar sent his cavalry out front instead and managed to push Cassivelaunus back to the Thames, which was protected by sharp stakes driven into the riverbed beneath the surface of the water.
Her
e he halted, but the nearby tribes were already sending envoys to surrender to the Roman forces. Roman troops also managed to find and raid Cassivelaunus’s headquarters, killing all of the cattle and making food very short indeed. Finally Cassivelaunus too sent a messenger offering terms of surrender. Caesar, who could see winter coming on, agreed to a peace as long as Mandubracius was put back in charge of the Trinovantes as a subject king of Rome; he extracted a promise from Cassivelaunus to leave the new king alone, and then went back to Gaul.
Caesar’s fame was now unmatched, but dreadful news was waiting for him: his beloved daughter Julia, Pompey’s wife, had died in childbirth.
Soon after, Crassus met with disaster in his war against Parthia. In 53, the year after Caesar’s triumphs in Gaul, Crassus marched towards the Euphrates river (which was now the Parthian border) with about seventy thousand foot soldiers and four thousand cavalry. The Romans met the Parthian army at the town of Carrhae: old Haran, the city where Nabonidus was born and where Terah, father of Abraham, had died. Almost at once, they found themselves outarmed; the Parthian archers, shooting from a distance, could easily penetrate their armor. “They were thus hit and killed,” Plutarch says,
dying, not by a quick and easy death, but with miserable pains and convulsions; for writhing upon the darts in their bodies, they broke them in their wounds, and when they would by force pluck out the barbed points, they caught the veins, so that they tore and tortured themselves. Many of them died thus, and those that survived were disabled for any service…their hands nailed to their shields, and their feet stuck to the ground, so that they could neither fight nor fly.22
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 71
