Rome, page 7
Sulla was a vengeful and merciless patrician, who by sheer drive and cunning had obtained a consulship and the command against Mithridates, the Persian king of Pontus, who had rashly invaded Rome’s provinces in Asia. Political enemies at home, members of the populares faction, canceled Sulla’s command, whereupon he retreated to Capua and gathered six legions that were prepared to go with him against the government in Rome and, once they had taken over the city, to go after Mithridates in Asia. In 86 B.C.E. Sulla and his legions invaded Greece and captured Athens. From there he returned to Italy, his army laden with booty. Landing at Brundisium in 83 B.C.E., he and his army were joined by Pompey, Marcus Crassus, and an ultraconservative senator, Metellus Pius, with all their men. The Roman government was not able to withstand them for long. Within a year, Sulla had taken Rome and was proclaimed dictator of Italy. He now began a reign of terror through “proscription,” publicly listing for death everyone who was or might have been an enemy; any soldier could murder such enemies, their property went to the state (namely, to Sulla), and all citizens were encouraged to betray and denounce whomsoever they chose—it was proleptic Stalinist justice, pure and simple. In this way, Sulla is thought to have eliminated forty senators and 1,600 equites, knights, whose sons and grandsons were also excluded from public life. Such was the exemplar and political patron of Pompey.
In 68 B.C.E. Caesar had been dispatched as a quaestor or magistrate to Hispania Ulterior (Further Spain); in that year, his wife, Cornelia, died, and he made what was clearly a political marriage to Pompeia, a girl in Pompey’s family. Now he was elected an aedile, a position of great importance to the plebeians of Rome, since it gave him charge of temples, markets, and (most telling of all) the corn supply, a great collector of votes. During this time, he spent lavishly on the restoration of temples and the holding of public entertainment, especially gladiatorial shows. He had to borrow the money from the immensely wealthy consul Marcus Crassus, destroyer of Spartacus’ slave revolt, who distrusted Pompey but was not above financing his son-in-law’s strategies for ingratiating himself with the commoners. Naturally, the cost of winning popularity in this way put Caesar heavily in debt to Crassus and the optimates, who did not altogether trust him. To get further as a politician, he needed to bypass their suspicions: to become a consul and then obtain a major military command, whose victories would be as irrefutable as Pompey’s. In Rome, Caesar had in 59 B.C.E. become a senator. He made an alliance with Pompey and Crassus (the “First Triumvirate”) and joined with Pompey—now consul—in repealing some of Sulla’s more extreme and biased alterations to the constitution. There was no sign, as yet, of any discord between Pompey and Caesar. In fact, in 59 B.C.E. Pompey married Julia, Caesar’s own daughter by his first wife, Cornelia, thus completing a neat matrimonial symmetry.
In 58, as proconsul, Caesar took on the control of both Cis- and Transalpine Gaul (the Po Valley in northern Italy, and southern France, which he called “the province,” a name commemorated ever since as Provence) as well as Illyricum (Dalmatia). From 58 to 50 B.C.E., Caesar concentrated on Rome’s northern, Gallic frontiers, methodically wearing down all resistance from them. He did not hesitate when it came to deciding what Rome’s overseas policies should be. Rome had to conquer and intimidate any state or people that might give it trouble. That had been the chief lesson of Cannae. Everyone concurred in this, including Cicero, who rather disliked Caesar personally but admired him politically:
He believed not only that it was necessary to wage war against those who he saw were already in arms against the Roman people, but also that all Gaul must be subjected to our sway. And so he has fought with the fiercest peoples, in gigantic battles against the Germans and Helvetians, with the greatest success. He has terrified, confined and subdued the rest, and accustomed them to obey the empire of the Roman people.…
Caesar’s conquest and pacification of Gaul was approaching completion by 56 B.C.E. Most of the country had come to heel and was now a Roman province, except for sporadic outbreaks of fierce resistance. In his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Caesar described how the ferocious Helvetii, having left their territory of what is now Switzerland, had migrated into Gaul, intending to get as far as the English Channel and resettle there. Caesar’s armies attacked them in their migration, and in Annecy, on the river Arroux, he wiped them out by the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands, turning the survivors back toward Switzerland. The same infiltration into Gaul, followed by the same costly expulsion, was attempted by German tribes. North of the Seine were the so-called Belgae, a warlike people consisting mainly of Germans intermarried with Celts. They were extremely suspicious of Caesar, and should have been. When Caesar established his winter headquarters on Gallic territory, and gave every sign of meaning to stay, they mobilized a full 300,000 warriors. Caesar’s reply was to raise two more legions in Cisalpine Gaul, bringing his total force to eight.
The coherence of the Belgic armies now began to disintegrate, largely because of supply shortages. Only the tribe known as the Nervii could keep an army in the field, and Caesar annihilated them in a battle on the Sambre in 57 B.C.E. Thus the resistance in Gaul only lasted for two military seasons. In the end, fully a third of all Gauls of military age were killed, and another third were sold into slavery: a toll which all but destroyed the masculine population of the province, made it incapable of further resistance, and made Caesar even more colossally rich than before. The Gallic leader Vercingetorix, a brilliant, charismatic figure who had given Caesar the most difficult and stubborn resistance of his career, was besieged and finally captured at Alesia in 52 B.C.E. Brought back to Rome in chains, he was paraded in Caesar’s triumph and then ignominiously strangled in a dungeon.
By 52 B.C.E., little opposition to Rome was left; by 50, there was none. The conquest of Gaul changed Rome from a Mediterranean power to a pan-European one, since (in the words of the historian Michael Grant) “a vast conglomeration of territories in continental and northern Europe had now been opened up to Romanization.” It also radically changed Gaul, transforming it, in effect, into an embryonic form of France. It was opened, though at great cost in blood and suffering, to classical culture.
With long-term thoughts of enlarging Rome’s imperium still further, Caesar dispatched an expedition across the Rhine to Germany in 55 B.C.E., with inconclusive results; this was less an invasion than a probe. Its purpose was to show Roman power to the Germans on German territory, which would deter them from crossing into Gaul. A friendly, or at least complaisant, German tribe called the Ubii offered him boats in which his troops could cross the Rhine, but Caesar refused—it would not look good to depend on the Germans to get him into Germany. Instead, by engineering means that are not clear from his own account, his men built a timber bridge across the mighty river. His army spent three weeks or so marauding and burning villages on the German side, and then withdrew, having made its point, and demolished its bridge behind it.
Next came an expedition to Britain. Why Caesar wanted to invade the island, which had never been attacked by Rome before, is unclear. Perhaps he suspected that the Britons would join with the Gauls in some later counterattack; perhaps he was lured by exaggerated stories of fabulous wealth (gold, silver, iron, and pearls) to be looted there. Or perhaps he merely wanted intelligence about this unknown place, and nobody could supply it to him. Whatever the motive, in 55 he led a fleet of transports and men-of-war directly to the southeastern coast of Britain, where they met with vilely contrary weather and stiff resistance from the “barbarian” infantry and cavalry. The Romans eventually succeeded in landing (at the present site of Deal) and making the Britons sue for peace, but they did not penetrate far inland, it was a shallow victory at best, and they brought back little information and less booty.
Caesar tried again the next year, 54. He assembled a new fleet of some eight hundred vessels, carrying five legions and two thousand cavalry. This time the conditions were more favorable, and the Romans fought their way north, crossing the Thames with intent to attack the British commander Cassivelaunus. They besieged this king’s stronghold in Hertfordshire, and captured him; terms were made. But then news arrived that an insurrection was brewing among the Gauls, so, with reluctance, Caesar withdrew his army across the Channel; the complete conquest of Britain, and its reduction to a province of Rome, would have to wait for nearly a century, until it was achieved by the armies of the Emperor Claudius.
But precisely because so little was known about Britain in Rome, the very fact of going there endowed Caesar with mystique and celebrity at home, on top of the glory he had earned with his conquest of Gaul and the readership his brilliant Commentaries, the best book on war a Roman had ever written, had acquired. He was, moreover, extremely wealthy now from the sale of Gallic prisoners-of-war as slaves. He raised the scale of his influence-buying. One of the consuls of the year 50 B.C.E., Lucius Aemilius Paullus, is said to have raked in 36 million sesterces from Caesar—this at a time when a line soldier in the Roman army was paid a thousand sesterces a year. Surpassingly rich, overwhelmingly popular: nothing could have been more propitious for a major political career in Rome.
The big problem was that he could not return to Rome. He could not come back with his legions, because by law no commander could enter the city with his troops. But he could not come back without them, for that would have meant laying down his command and exposing himself to prosecution by his many enemies.
But he had been moving south. In January 49, the Senate sent him orders to disband his army. Caesar received them on the northern side of a small river called the Rubicon, the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper. (The name, deriving from the Latin ruber, red, referred to the color of its clay-filled water.) Caesar’s reaction to this letter was prompt and decisive. “As for myself,” he declared in his Civil War (1.9), “I have always reckoned the dignity of the Republic of first importance and preferable to life. I was indignant that a benefit conferred on me by the Roman people was being insolently wrested from me by my enemies.” And so, in that legendary phrase which has come to mean taking any fateful and irrevocable decision, he crossed the Rubicon and entered Italy with his troops.
This inevitably meant civil war. The commander of Rome’s troops in the war was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106–48 B.C.E.), known to history as Pompey, a resourceful and highly skilled commander, the only man in Rome capable of standing up against Julius Caesar. Pompey’s career, up to this point, had been marked by brilliant successes which also served dramatically to highlight the weaknesses of the aging republican system. From now on, Roman politics would have less and less to do with democracy, becoming more and more determined by ambitious individuals backed by their own armies.
Quite early in his career, Pompey showed every sign of developing into just such a prototypical strongman, utterly ruthless and bent on power. Sulla had recognized that Rome’s growing empire could not possibly be governed by popular acclamation, by democratic votes. That system was too unwieldy. His policy, therefore, was to shift the authority of the state away from Rome’s tribunes, magistrates and popular assembly, which he regarded as mere rabble, and return them to the Senate. Under Sulla’s new system, the senators got all their judicial powers back, while consuls and praetors, shorn of their military power, had to content themselves with being the Senate’s good servants. But there was a question: what if some new Roman warlord turned on the Senate with his forces and simply threw them out? Sulla’s solution was to pass a law whereby there would be no Roman armed force in Rome. As soon as any returning soldiers, or their officers, crossed the limits of the urbs Romae, they would automatically have to lay down their arms, surrender their command, and become private citizens once more. Of course, this needed enforcement, which Sulla, the winner of the war against Mithridates, king of Pontus, was prompt to supply. He had accumulated huge reserves of booty and cash, and these financed his own invasion of Italy in 83 B.C.E. Naturally, this did not go without a hitch, for there were strong anti-Sulla feelings in both Sicily and North Africa, and Sulla enlisted the brilliant and ruthless young Pompey to suppress them—which he did with unrestrained butchery and bloodshed. By 81 B.C.E. the anti-Sulla factions were crushed, and Pompey—who was only twenty-five at the time—was in a position to demand a full triumph from Sulla on his return to Rome, and the cognomen Magnus, “Pompey the Great,” attached to his name. There was no denying that Pompey had burst through the exclusive ranks of Rome’s upper establishment, the optimates. No previous Roman had won such an honor so early in his military career.
In 70 B.C.E., he was appointed consul. The other consul, his reluctant and watchful yokefellow, was Marcus Licinius Crassus, the man who had put down Spartacus’ slave revolt (it particularly irked him that Pompey, who had mopped up a last remnant of Spartacus’ defeated army, took credit for suppressing the whole rebellion) and made a huge fortune by corralling the confiscated property of Roman citizens stripped of their assets in the proscriptions. Friction and ill-submerged conflict between the two billionaires, Crassus and Pompey, were inevitable.
In January 49 B.C.E., seeing that the Rubicon had been crossed and Caesar was now on Italian soil, the Senate voted martial law against Caesar and turned over the government of the Republic to Pompey. But Caesar did not delay for a moment after crossing the Rubicon. He led his ever-growing army in a whirlwind march down the east coast of Italy, and Pompey and the Senate had to skedaddle out of Rome so fast that they even left the national treasury behind. The continuous presence of senators turned out to be a great encumbrance to Pompey. They kept demanding reports, criticizing plans, and in general getting in the way. This did much to neutralize what would otherwise have been a clear advantage for the Pompeians. They had ships, and Caesar had no navy. They were able to assemble and train a large army at Dyrrhachium in the west of Greece. Caesar’s troops were so poorly supplied that many were reduced to eating the bark off trees. And yet, by a combination of superior generalship and good military luck, Caesar was able to beat Pompey, who offered him battle at Pharsalus in August 48 and was roundly defeated. Unnerved, Pompey fled to take refuge in Egypt, where the Ptolemaic government—fearing reprisals from the dreaded Caesar—cut off his head and dispatched that grisly trophy to Caesar.
Julius Caesar now ruled Rome and its enormous, ever-growing empire without opposition. In 46 B.C.E. he made himself dictator for ten years, and in February 44, the appointment was extended for the whole of his future life. The official calendar, which stood badly in need of revision, was indeed revised, with the month which had been known as Quintilis renamed “July.” Caesar’s head began to appear on coins, an homage which up to then had been reserved for kings and gods. Caesar was the first man to overcome, and in essence overthrow, the ancient Roman republican aversion to kingship. Plutarch believed that Caesar planned to have himself turned into a deified king, and he was probably right, though the issue is still debatable. Certainly the masses of Rome came very rapidly to view him as the next thing to a living god, and a kind of Caesarian cult was fostered by his closest friend, Mark Antony.
Now that the wars were over and won, Caesar, with the support of a thoroughly complaisant Senate, awarded himself no fewer than five complete triumphs, four after destroying Scipio (at Thapsus in North Africa, April 46 B.C.E.) and one more for smashing the sons of Pompey (at Munda in Spain, March 45 B.C.E.). The grandest was the triumph awarded him for his conquest of Gaul, but it was in his Pontic triumph at Zela over Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, whom he suspected of trying to restore his father’s kingdom in the east, that Caesar was inspired to produce the most famous phrase in military history. On the victorious march-past, he displayed on a placard the three laconic words: “Veni, vidi, vici”—“I came, I saw, I conquered.”
These Roman triumphs were ceremonies of great importance, and they followed a set pattern, whose origins lay in the Etruscan past. To qualify as a triumphator, the conquering hero had first to be acclaimed by his soldiers. He must hold a magistracy with imperium, the autocratic power to command. (If he did not have such a magistracy, there could be no triumph for him, no matter how resounding his victory.) He must show that he had killed at least five thousand enemy soldiers, and brought home enough of his army to demonstrate their complete victory. Because Rome itself did not fall within his imperium, he must now wait outside the city limits until the Senate had agreed to grant him that absolute power for a single day. Once that was done, the triumphant leader could enter at the head of his troops, preceded by his lictors, each of whom carried a bundle of rods and an ax—the fasces re-adopted by Mussolini in the twentieth century—to symbolize his power to arrest, punish, and execute. A dictator had twenty-four lictors, lesser officials fewer. The soldiers raised a chant of praise, “Io triumphe,” and sang mildly obscene songs, the “Fescennine verses,” poking fun at their leader; a typical verse about Caesar (who was bald, and renowned for his sexual appetites) ran:
Home we bring the hairless Fucker,
Roman maidens, bar your doors—
For the Roman gold you sent him
Went to pay his Gallic whores.
Usually the appearance of the victor would be preceded by a long parade of his spoils. Thus the triumph of Aemilius Paullus was preceded, according to Plutarch, by an entire day’s march-past of some 250 wagons bearing the statues, paintings, and colossal images looted from Perseus, king of Macedon. The next day, looted Greek silver, bronze, and gold were displayed on a similar train of chariots, along with captured armor. Not until the third day did triumphant Aemilius Paullus make his appearance, followed by Perseus, “looking like one altogether stunned and deprived of reason through the greatness of his misfortunes,” as he must indeed have been.
