WHEN HE RETIRED, Sulla was still only about sixty years old—not young by any means, but also nowhere near death. As Sulla completed his memoirs, he no doubt looked forward to at least another decade of honorable retirement. His wife Metella had recently died, but he had taken a new bride and had another new baby on the way. But he also had premonitions of his imminent demise. He described a dream where his dead son “appeared to him… and besought his father to pursue an end to anxious thoughts, and come with him to his mother Metella, there to live in peace and quietness with her.” But even these unsettling dreams did not deter him from working on his memoir or transacting business that presented itself.36
But while conducting a piece of public business in 78, Sulla was suddenly stricken. A local magistrate had been caught embezzling money from the city treasury, and while Sulla yelled at the thief, something ruptured inside his body and he spurted blood out of his mouth. Almost certainly caused by liver failure or a huge ulcer, Sulla collapsed in a heap of blood and bile and was carried back home, where he spent “a night of wretchedness.” By morning, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was dead.37
When word of the dictator’s death reached Rome, a debate erupted over how to respond. Some believed that it was already time to mark his career infamous and deny funeral rights. Sulla had murdered his fellow citizens and made himself tyrant. But Pompey stepped forward and retorted that he believed that a great man like Sulla deserved an elaborate public funeral, and he couldn’t believe it was even a question. The elaborate funeral was duly staged. But the debate over Sulla’s legacy was only beginning. In later years, what one thought of Sulla spoke volumes about one’s character.38
Sulla’s ashes were laid in his ancestral tomb, and a monument to him was erected in the Campus Martius. His enduring credo was emblazoned on the monument for all time: “No friend ever surpassed him in kindness, and no enemy in wickedness.”39
THE SULLAN CONSTITUTION did not survive. In the first years of the new regime, the senior Sullan leaders who took over Rome—Metellus Pius, Pompey, and Crassus chief among them—scrupulously followed Sulla’s constitution. But as the memory of Sulla faded and new political rivalries emerged, these leaders abandoned the Sullan decrees whenever expedient. In the end, it turned out Sulla’s “final” settlement was just another milestone on the Republic’s road to ruin.
One of the reasons Sulla’s constitution fared so poorly was that those who supported it did so mildly, and those who hated it did so passionately. Sulla’s proscriptions had left a mob of enemies in their wake. After the killing was over, the dictator Sulla barred their sons and grandsons from running for office. These families were among the most prominent in Rome, and cutting off their access to public office sewed permanent resentment. Many of them joined an aborted revolt against Sulla’s constitution, led by the consul Lepidus in 78. The revolt was quickly suppressed, but it showed how tenuous the peace really was. Even when the ban on the proscribed families was lifted and they were allowed to return to public life, it was certainly not with the same veneration for republican morality—and certainly with no respect for Sulla’s constitution.40
The law curtailing the power of the tribunes lasted barely a decade. Despite Sulla’s efforts, the populare path to power was still a viable option, and leaders curried favor with the people throughout the 70s by promising to restore the tribunes to their full dignity. The men who finally capitalized on this popular promise were Pompey and Crassus, who restored the ancient power of the tribunes during their shared consulship in 70. In that same year, the praetor Lucius Aurelius Cotta passed a law undoing Sulla’s judicial laws and opening the jury pool to both the Senate and Equestrians. Sulla’s attempt at Italian land redistribution fared no better. Just as had happened with the Gracchan program, within a generation Sulla’s veterans had mostly sold their land to rich magnates, and the end result was the Italian peninsula being dominated by large estates like never before. The provisional reorganization was similarly inadequate. Even with Sulla’s expanded roster of magistracies, the Roman Empire was still only run by perhaps a hundred men. It was not until the Augustan settlements that something resembling a permanent bureaucracy stabilized the corrupt and inadequate provisional administration.41
No one was more to blame for the failure of the Sullan constitution than Sulla himself. The facts of Sulla’s career spoke louder than his constitutional musings. As a young man he had flouted traditional rules of loyalty and deference to spread his own fame. When insulted, he marched legions on Rome. While abroad, he ran his own military campaigns and conducted his own diplomacy. When challenged back in Rome, he launched a civil war, declared himself dictator, killed his enemies, and then retired to get drunk in splendid luxury. The biography of Sulla drowned out the constitution of Sulla, and the men who followed him paid attention to what could be done rather than what should be done.
In the final analysis, Sulla’s attempt to restore the Republic was doomed because he misdiagnosed the problem. In Sulla’s estimation the political upheavals that wracked Rome from the time of his birth in 138 until his death in 78 were the result of the Senate losing their dominant position. But what he did not realize is that the senatorial domination he had grown up with was a recent development. In fact, that domination was a leading cause of the problem, not a solution. Sulla thought he was resetting the constitutional balance to its natural state. Instead he was just winding back the clock on a ticking time bomb.
As would be predicted by Polybius’s constitutional theory, the restored domination of the senatorial oligarchy provoked populare demagogues, leading to an even more ferocious series of civil wars in the 40s and 30s. But Polybian theory did not hold for long. The fall of the senatorial oligarchy was precipitated by rhetorical populists, but their aim was never democracy, nor did democracy follow. Instead, weary of a generation of civil war, the Romans moved directly to the stable hand of an enlightened monarch. Unlike Sulla, however, when Augustus ascended to sole power he did not retire. So in the end, Sulla’s constitution did not lead to the permanent triumph of the aristocratic element, but rather the permanent triumph of the monarchical element. Though there never would be another king of Rome, there would be emperors. And they would rule Rome for a very long time.
THE CORE OF the future Caesarian coalition that would reduce the Senate to a tiresome social club was rooted in the old Gracchan coalition of rural peasants, plebs urbana, publicani merchants, and renegade nobles. Mixing populare rhetoric with direct appeals to self-interest, the Caesars would be able to harness these powers to finally destroy the senatorial aristocracy. But that did not mean every member shared equally in the spoils.
The original demographic tapped by the Gracchans was the rural poor. The small farmers had been the focus of reform efforts going back to Tiberius Gracchus’s original Lex Agraria. The Gracchi had tried to rebuild the population of small farmers by redistributing ager publicus to poor citizens. But within a generation the rich had bought back all the plots. Gaius Marius addressed the problem by recruiting landless plebs into the armies and then discharging them with land in the province in which they had fought. Marian colonies now existed in Africa, Sicily, and Gaul. Sulla then attempted one last redistribution of Italian land, but as we just saw this redistribution also failed. The economic momentum toward sprawling latifundia was by then inexorable. The solution to the problem of the small farmer in Italy was only solved when they were all dead.42
The plebs urbana, meanwhile, grew in numbers and strength. As the dislocations in rural Italy continued, migration to the cities began in earnest. By the age of Augustus, the population of Rome had ballooned to 750,000. During the imperial Golden Age in the 100s AD, it went over a million. The growth of Rome is partly attributable to expansion of the grain dole. The subsidized grain supply introduced by Gaius Gracchus became a permanent feature of Roman municipal policy. But it is important to remember that the grain dole only applied to male citizens, and only entitled those citizens to a subsista
nce ration. So though the idleness of the plebs urbana was a frequent complaint, true idleness would have been fatal. For the rest of the Republic, and the entirety of the imperial age, feeding the plebs urbana a stable supply of cheap grain was a routine part of municipal administration. The grain dole helped create stability—as welcome to the rulers as to the ruled.43
Benefiting most from the triumph of the Caesars were the Equestrians. After the death of Sulla, Rome only continued to expand and open up new opportunities for business. As the principal merchants of the most dominant power in the Mediterranean, the Equestrians controlled huge quantities of wealth. When Augustus imposed his imperial settlement in the 20s, he used men of Equestrian rank to fill his growing provincial bureaucracy. In Egypt, Augustus would not even let a man of senatorial rank enter. Under Augustus’s regime, the governor of Egypt had to be a man of Equestrian rank. The Equestrians would go on to manage the empire for the next five hundred years.44
One pillar of the original Gracchan coalition that had triumphed already was the Italians. The Italian question had been answered when Sulla accepted unqualified civitas and suffragium in the spring of 83. Now full and equal citizens, every Italian was legally indistinguishable from a Roman. Prosperous Italian Equestrians became prosperous Roman Equestrians. Powerful Italian leaders became powerful Roman leaders. There was, of course, always lingering social elitism. To the snobs on the Palatine Hill a man like Cicero would always be a novus homo Italian. This snobbery would persist for a thousand years but was legally meaningless. Rome was Italy, and Italy was Rome.
Supplanting the Italians as Rome’s second-class citizens would be the foreign provincials. Republican governors continued to pump the provinces for money, much of which went to fund factional politics back in Rome. This problem was not solved until the Augustan settlements of the 20s BC. With Augustus claiming supreme proconsular authority outside Italy, his provinces were run by stable groups of Equestrian administrators operating under Augustus’s personal sovereignty. Recognizing that the provincials were just as deserving of good government as the Italians, Augustus dialed back the haphazard exploitation and created a self-perpetuating balance between power and mercy. The emperor Tiberius would chide an overzealous governor: “It was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it.”45
Oddly enough, the issue of provincial citizenship never became a major object of conflict. After the unification of Italy, the other provincial centers in Spain, Greece, and Africa remained merely subjects of Rome. This was a pattern that continued as Rome expanded into Gaul and Syria. But individuals could be awarded citizenship (the legions in particular became a frequently trod path), and soon there were Roman citizens of Spanish, Gallic, African, Greek, and Syrian origin. But mass provincial citizenship was never considered until the third century AD, and even then was imposed from the top down. With many noncitizens exempt from certain taxes, the emperor Caracalla decreed universal citizenship in 211. As the historian Cassius Dio says, “nominally he was honoring them, but his real purpose was to increase his revenues.” So mass provincial citizenship was only extended once it became a burden rather than a privilege.46
THESE GROUPS REENTERED the historical stream after the death of Sulla and proceeded to get back to the business of jockeying for power. The brief revolt led by the populare consul Lepidus in 78 reminded everyone how volatile the situation remained. The provinces of Spain also remained an open wound. Having escaped Italy, Quintus Sertorius established a base in Iberia and kept up the war against the Sullans even after the heads of all his former compatriots rotted in the Forum. Joined by other Marian exiles fleeing the proscriptions, Sertorius spent ten years keeping the war alive. Both Metellus Pius and Pompey failed to subdue him. When Pompey got sick of being stuck in the Spanish quagmire, he extracted himself by orchestrating the assassination of Sertorius in 72. This was the last fire of a conflagration that had begun with the Social War nearly twenty years earlier.47
Meanwhile, the victorious Sullans fractured. Metellus Pius, Pompey, and Crassus withdrew to their respective corners and pursued their own agendas. Crassus and Pompey, in particular, detested each other. When Spartacus raised the final great slave revolt that consumed Italy in 73–72, Crassus was the one who finally ended the uprising. But to Crassus’s fury, Pompey managed to swing back from Spain, defeat the last remaining cohort of renegade slaves, and take credit for truly ending the conflict. The bitter rivalry of Crassus and Pompey helped define the next twenty years of Roman politics.48
But between Crassus and Pompey rose an ambitious young noble who would outshine them both: Gaius Julius Caesar. Having survived the proscription, Caesar emerged in the 70s as an ambitious young political talent. In 69, he took the provocative step of openly mourning the death of his aunt Julia—the wife of Gaius Marius. During her funeral procession, Caesar displayed images of Marius for the first time since Sulla’s dictatorship. It annoyed the optimates in the Senate, but it ginned up a wave of populare sympathy for Marius, whom they had once called the Third Founder of Rome. This helped pave the way for the ban on proscribed families being lifted, but those who had felt the indignity of the proscription formed an unspoken bond, and an affinity for populare politics. Caesar skillfully exploited their lingering resentment.49
While the nobles fought, Rome continued to expand. The war with Mithridates had never really ended. Undeterred by his earlier defeat, Mithridates launched a series of major wars against Rome that lasted all the way until his death, at the hands of Pompey the Great, in 63. With Mithridates finally defeated, Pompey took the legions on a grand tour of the eastern Mediterranean, organizing the east into a network of allied client kingdoms. When Pompey returned to Rome, Caesar successfully reconciled Pompey and Crassus and together they formed a secret alliance called the First Triumvirate that would dominate Rome for the next decade. The Triumvirate awarded land to Pompey’s veterans, approved a war in Syria for Crassus, and made Caesar proconsul of Gaul. While Pompey remained in Rome, Caesar successfully conquered all of modern France. Crassus meanwhile was led into an ambush in Syria and died a gruesome death in 53.50
The death of Crassus broke the alliance between Caesar and Pompey, and the political factions realigned again for a final showdown in the 40s. Pompey lined up with the optimates in the Senate. Caesar lined up with his own network of populare partisans and loyal veterans. After crossing the Rubicon in 49, Caesar defeated all his enemies and had himself declared dictator for life. Mocking Sulla by saying that “Sulla did not know his ABCs when he laid down his dictatorship,” Caesar clearly did not plan to relinquish the Dictatorship, so a gang of senators led by Brutus and Cassius murdered him in 44. After the Ides of March, Caesar’s heirs Octavian and Mark Antony* combined to defeat the remnants of the Senate, and then waged a civil war against each other for control of the empire. Victorious over all his enemies, Octavian transformed himself into Augustus in 27, and the Roman Republic transformed into the Roman Empire.51
Augustus’s imperial settlement was premised on the accumulation of all sovereign authority in the hands of one man. The Centuriate Assembly elected Augustus consul, so he held consular authority. The Plebeian Assembly simultaneously elected him tribune, so he held tribunician authority. With that authority, Augustus could veto any bill and was immune from physical attack. The Senate also granted him proconsular power in all the provinces, making him commander in chief of almost all of Rome’s armed forces. In time, he also became pontifex maximus and controlled the priesthoods and temples. Augustus maintained the charade of republican government throughout his reign. Annual elections proceeded as before, as did meetings of the Assembly. Augustus also met regularly with a senior council of senators to give them the appearance of equal participation. Augustus never created a new office of “emperor”—that is simply the label later Romans gave to the bound-together fascist of individual sovereign powers now collectively vested in the hands of one man. Augustus himself preferred to be called simply princeps—
the first citizen among equals.52
But underneath the charade of republican ritual, the monarchical element of the Polybian constitution had permanently triumphed. Still, contrary to Polybius’s theory, the triumph of the Caesars did not inevitably lead to an aristocratic response. The imperial administration created by Augustus entered a mode of permanent self-perpetuation. Provincials and Equestrians thrived under the new order, and if a few senators lost power, so what? Inside the Senate there was hope the Old Republic would be revived, but the Republic was never coming back. Sulla died in 78 believing he had breathed new life into the Republic. But what looked like the dawning of a new age was really the last moments of light before the Roman Republic disappeared over the horizon.
* Grandson of the late Marcus Antonius.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ANY LIST OF acknowledgments must begin with my wife, Brandi, to whom this book is already dedicated. She has been with me every step of the way and been an unfailing source of strength, support, and love. I would also like to thank my children, Elliott and Olive, who have been wonderful through the entire process and who I hope like the book once they learn how to read. My parents, Doug and Liz Duncan, have also provided incredible support not just while the book was being written, but throughout my entire life. Without them this book would not exist. My success is their success.
This book would also not exist without my literary agent, Rachel Vogel, who sent me an e-mail one day asking if I had ever considered writing a book. She then nursed a half-baked idea from infancy to maturity and guided me through the long and convoluted process of selling, writing, and promotion. I could not have asked for a better shepherd through the often baffling world of publishing.
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