The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
THE FORGE OF CHRISTENDOM
The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD
The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
Fiction
ATTIS
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
THE SLEEPER IN THE SANDS
THE BONEHUNTER
Translations
The Histories by Herodotus
Copyright (C) 2015 by Tom Holland
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Little, Brown, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK Company, London, in 2015.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Cover photography (clockwise from upper left) Nero (C) DEA Picture Library/ Getty Images; Augustus
(C) E+/ Getty Images; Tiberius (C) Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse, France / Bridgeman Images; Claudius and Caligula (C) DEA Picture Library Getty Images
Author photograph (C) Charlie Hopkinson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holland, Tom, author.
Dynasty : the rise and fall of the House of Caesar / by Tom Holland.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-385-53784-1 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-53790-2 (eBook) 1. Rome—Politics and government—30 B.C.–476 A.D. 2. Rome—History—Empire, 30 B.C.–476 A.D.
3. Emperors—Rome.
I. Title.
DG270.H65 2015
937’.070922—dc23
2015026911
eBook ISBN 9780385537902
v4.1
a
For Katy
‘at simul heroum laudes et facta parentis iam legere…’
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Tom Holland
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Maps
Family Tree
Preface
Epigraph
I PADRONE
1 CHILDREN OF THE WOLF
2 BACK TO THE FUTURE
3 THE EXHAUSTION OF CRUELTY
II COSA NOSTRA
4 THE LAST ROMAN
5 LET THEM HATE ME
6 IO SATURNALIA!
7 WHAT AN ARTIST
Timeline
Dramatis Personae
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As ever with my books, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to numerous people for their help. To my various editors, Richard Beswick, Gerry Howard, Frits van der Meij and Christoph Selzer, for their support, assistance and advice. To Iain Hunt, for all the care and patience he has brought to disentangling the knots of my manuscript – maps, timelines, end notes and all. To Susan de Soissons, the finest and kindest publicity director a writer could hope to have.
To Patrick Walsh, best of agents, and everyone at Conville and Walsh. To Guy de la Bédoyère, Paul Cartledge, Catharine Edwards, Llewelyn Morgan and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, for generously bringing to bear the full illuminating light of their scholarship on my manuscript, and exposing many an error. To Dan Snow, who more than made up for distracting me from the politics of the first century AD during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign by reading a first draft of Dynasty, to invaluable effect. To Jamie Muir, who (as he has done ever since I wrote Rubicon) read each successive chapter as I printed it off – and then went the extra mile by accompanying me deep into the Teutoburg Forest. To Gareth Blayney, for his beautiful illustrations of ancient Rome, and for agreeing to bring all his talent to bear on the cover of this book. To Sophie Hay, for her kindness, generosity and enthusiasm, her photographs, her companionship on the road trip to Nemi and Spelunca, and her careful tracking of my Twitter avatar’s evolution. To Laura Jeffrey, for her whole-hearted enjoyment of the plumbing on Caligula’s pleasure-boat. To Stephen Key, for selflessly negotiating the roads between Rome, Nemi and Spelunca on behalf of Sophie, Laura and myself. To Mattia Buondonno, for his ebullient hospitality at Pompeii. To Charlie Campbell, for providing me with the opportunity to hit a six, bowl the Crown Prince of Udaipur, and play at Lord’s – and thereby feel for myself what it must have been to rank as Augustus. To my cats, Edith and Tostig, for only periodically sitting on my keyboard. To my beloved wife, Sadie, for living these past years with the Caesars as well as me. To my younger daughter, Eliza, for (oh so perversely) choosing Nerva as her favourite emperor. To my elder daughter, Katy, to whom with all my love I dedicate this book.
MAPS
The Roman World in 44 BC
Central Rome
Italy
Augustan Rome
Germany
The East
The Bay of Naples
Gaul and Britain
Nero’s Rome
Greece
The Roman World in AD 69
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Detail right
PREFACE
AD 40. It is early in the year. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus sits on a lofty platform beside the Ocean. As waves break on the shore and spray hangs in the air, he gazes out to sea. Many Roman ships over the years have been lost to its depths. Strange monsters are rumoured to lurk in its grey waters, while beyond the horizon there lies an island teeming with savage and mustachioed head-hunters: Britain. Perils such as these, lurking as they do on the very margins of civilisation, are fit to challenge even the boldest and most iron-willed hero.
The story of the Roman people, though, has always had about it an aura of the epic. They have emerged from dim and provincial obscurity to the command of the world: a feat like no other in history. Repeatedly put to trial, repeatedly surviving it triumphant, Rome has been well steeled for global rule. Now, seven hundred and ninety-two years after her founding, the man who ranks as her emperor wields power worthy of a god. Lined up alongside him on the northern beach are rank upon rank of the most formidable fighting force on the planet: armour-clad legionaries, catapults, battlefield artillery.
The Emperor Gaius scans their length. He gives a command. At once, there is a blaring of trumpets. The signal for battle. Then silence. The Emperor raises his voice. ‘Soldiers!’ he cries. ‘I command you to pick up shells. Fill your helmets with the spoils of the Ocean. ’1 And the legionaries, obedient to their emperor’s order, do so.
Such, at any rate, is the story. But is it true? Did the soldiers really pick up shells? And if they did – why? The episode is one of the most notorious in the life of a man whose entire career remains to this day a thing of infamy.
Caligula, the name by which the Emperor Gaius is better known, is one of the few people from ancient history to be as familiar to pornographers as to classicists. The scandalous details of his reign have always provoked prurient fascination. ‘But enough of the emperor; now to the monster. ’2 So wrote Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a scholar and archivist in the imperial palace who doubled in his spare time as a biographer of the Caesars, and whose life
of Caligula is the oldest extant one that we possess. Written almost a century after the Emperor’s death, it catalogues a quite sensational array of depravities and crimes. He slept with his sisters! He dressed up as the goddess Venus! He planned to award his horse the highest magistracy in Rome! Set against the background of such stunts, Caligula’s behaviour on the Channel coast comes to seem a good deal less surprising. Suetonius certainly had no problem in explaining his behaviour. ‘He was ill in both body and mind. ’3
But if Caligula was sick, then so too was Rome. The powers of life and death wielded by an emperor would have been abhorrent to an earlier generation. Almost a century before Caligula massed his legions on the shores of the Ocean and gazed out to Britain, his great-great-great-great-uncle had done the same – and then actually crossed the Channel. The exploits of Gaius Julius Caesar had been as spectacular as any in his city’s history: not only two invasions of Britain but the permanent annexation of Gaul, as the Romans called what today is France. He had achieved his feats, though, as a citizen of a republic – one in which it was taken for granted by most that death was the only conceivable alternative to liberty. When Julius Caesar, trampling down this presumption, had laid claim to a primacy over his fellow citizens, it had resulted first in civil war, and then, after he had crushed his domestic foes as he had previously crushed the Gauls, in his assassination. Only after two more murderous bouts of slaughtering one another had the Roman people finally been inured to their servitude. Submission to the rule of a single man had redeemed their city and its empire from self-destruction – but the cure itself had been a kind of sickness.
Augustus, their new master had called himself, ‘The Divinely Favoured One’. The great-nephew of Julius Caesar, he had waded through blood to secure the command of Rome and her empire – and then, his rivals once dispatched, had coolly posed as a prince of peace. As cunning as he was ruthless, as patient as he was decisive, Augustus had managed to maintain his supremacy for decades, and then to die in his bed. Key to this achievement had been his ability to rule with rather than against the grain of Roman tradition: for by pretending that he was not an autocrat, he had licensed his fellow citizens to pretend that they were still free. A veil of shimmering and seductive subtlety had been draped over the brute contours of his dominance.
Time, though, had seen this veil become increasingly threadbare. On Augustus’s death in AD 14, the powers that he had accumulated over the course of his long and mendacious career stood revealed, not as temporary expediencies, but rather as a package to be handed down to an heir. His choice of successor had been a man raised since childhood in his own household, an aristocrat by the name of Tiberius. The many qualities of the
new Caesar, which ranged from exemplary aristocratic pedigree to a track record as Rome’s finest general, had counted for less than his status as Augustus’s adopted son – and everyone had known it.
Tiberius, a man who all his life had been wedded to the virtues of the vanished Republic, had made an unhappy monarch; but Caligula, who had succeeded him in turn after a reign of twenty-three years, was unembarrassed.
That he ruled the Roman world by virtue neither of age nor of experience, but as the great-grandson of Augustus, bothered him not the slightest. ‘Nature produced him, in my opinion, to demonstrate just how far unlimited vice can go when combined with unlimited power.’4 Such was the obituary delivered on him by Seneca, a philosopher who had known him well. The judgement, though, was not just on Caligula, but on Seneca’s own peers, who had cringed and grovelled before the Emperor while he was still alive, and on the Roman people as a whole. The age was a rotten one: diseased, debased, degraded.
Or so many believed. Not everyone agreed. The regime established by Augustus would never have endured had it failed to offer what the Roman people had come so desperately to crave after decades of civil war: peace and order. The vast agglomeration of provinces ruled from Rome, which stretched from the North Sea to the Sahara, and from the Atlantic to the Fertile Crescent, reaped the benefits as well. Three centuries on, when the nativity of the most celebrated man to have been born in Augustus’s reign stood in infinitely clearer focus than it had done at the time, a bishop named Eusebius could see in the Emperor’s achievements the very guiding hand of God. ‘It was not just as a consequence of human action,’ he declared, ‘that the greater part of the world should have come under Roman rule at the precise moment Jesus was born. The coincidence that saw our Saviour begin his mission against such a backdrop was undeniably arranged by divine agency. After all
– had the world still been at war, and not united under a single form of government, then how much more difficult would it have been for the disciples to undertake their travels.’5
Eusebius could see, with the perspective provided by distance, just how startling was the feat of globalisation brought to fulfilment under Augustus and his successors. Brutal though the methods deployed to uphold it were, the sheer immensity of the regions pacified by Roman arms was unprecedented.
‘To accept a gift,’ went an ancient saying, ‘is to sell your liberty.’ Rome held her conquests in fee; but the peace that she bestowed upon them in exchange was not necessarily to be sniffed at. Whether in the suburbs of the capital itself, booming under the Caesars to become the largest city the world had ever seen, or across the span of the Mediterranean, united now for the first
time under a single power, or in the furthermost corners of an empire whose global reach was without precedent, the pax Romana brought benefits to millions. Provincials might well be grateful. ‘He cleared the sea of pirates, and filled it with merchant shipping.’ So a Jew from the great Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria, writing in praise of Augustus, enthused. ‘He gave freedom to every city, brought order where there had been chaos, and civilised savage peoples.’6 Similar hymns of praise could be – and were –
addressed to Tiberius and Caligula. The depravities for which both men would end up notorious rarely had much impact on the world at large. It mattered little in the provinces who ruled as emperor – just so long as the centre held.
Nevertheless, even in the furthest reaches of the Empire, Caesar was a constant presence. How could he not be? ‘In the whole wide world, there is not a single thing that escapes him. ’7 An exaggeration, of course – and yet due reflection of the mingled fear and awe that an emperor could hardly help but inspire in his subjects. He alone had command of Rome’s monopoly of violence: the legions and the whole menacing apparatus of provincial government, which existed to ensure that taxes were paid, rebels slaughtered, and malefactors thrown to beasts or nailed up on crosses. There was no need for an emperor constantly to be showing his hand for dread of his arbitrary power to be universal across the world. Small wonder, then, that the face of Caesar should have become, for millions of his subjects, the face of Rome.
Rare was the town that did not boast some image of him: a statue, a portrait bust, a frieze. Even in the most provincial backwater, to handle money was to be familiar with Caesar’s profile. Within Augustus’s own lifetime, no living citizen had ever appeared on a Roman coin; but no sooner had he seized control of the world than his face was being minted everywhere, stamped on gold, and silver, and bronze. *1 ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ Even an itinerant street-preacher in the wilds of Galilee, holding up a coin and demanding to know whose face it portrayed, could be confident of the answer: ‘Caesar’s. ’8
No surprise, then, that the character of an emperor, his achievements, his relationships and his foibles, should have been topics of obsessive fascination to his subjects. ‘Your destiny it is to live as in a theatre where your audience is the entire world. ’9 Such was the warning attributed by one Roman historian to Maecenas, a particularly trusted confidant of Augustus’s. Whether he really said it or not, the sentiment was true to the sheer theatricality of his master’s performance. Augustus himself, lying on his deathbed, was reported by Suetonius to have asked his friends whether he had played his part well in the
comedy of life; and then, on being assured that he had, to have demanded their applause as he headed for the exit. A good emperor had no choice but to be a good actor – as too did everyone else in the drama’s cast. Caesar, after all, was never alone on the stage. His potential successors were public figures simply by virtue of their relationship to him. Even the wife, the niece or the granddaughter of an emperor might have her role to play. Get it wrong, and she was liable to pay a terrible price; but get it right, and her face might end up appearing on coins alongside Caesar’s own. No household in history had ever before been so squarely in the public eye as that of Augustus. The fashions and hairstyles of its most prominent members, reproduced in exquisite detail by sculptors across the Empire, set trends from Syria to Spain.
Their achievements were celebrated with spectacularly showy monuments, their scandals repeated with relish from seaport to seaport. Propaganda and gossip, each feeding off the other, gave to the dynasty of Augustus a celebrity that ranked, for the first time, as continent-spanning.
To what extent, though, did all the vaunting claims chiselled into showy marble and all the rumours whispered in marketplaces and bars approximate to what had actually happened in Caesar’s palace? To be sure, by the time that Suetonius came to write his biographies of the emperors, there was no lack of material for him to draw upon: everything from official inscriptions to garbled gossip. Shrewder analysts, though, when they sought to make sense of Augustus and his heirs, could recognise at the heart of the dynasty’s story a darkness that mocked and defied their efforts. Once, back in the days of the Republic, affairs of state had been debated in public, and the speeches of Rome’s leaders transcribed for historians to study; but with the coming to power of Augustus, all that had changed. ‘For, from then on, things began to be done secretly, and in such a way as not to be made public.’10 Yes, the old rhythms of the political year, the annual cycle of elections and magistracies that once, back in the days of the Republic, had delivered to ambitious Romans the genuine opportunity to sway their city’s fate, still endured – but as a largely irrelevant sideshow. The cockpit of power lay elsewhere now. The world had come to be governed, not in assemblies of the great and good, but in private chambers. A woman’s whisperings in an emperor’s ear, a document discreetly passed to him by a slave: either might have a greater impact than even the most ringing public oration. The implication, for any biographer of the Caesars, was grim but inescapable. ‘Even when it comes to notable events, we are in the dark. ’11
The historian who delivered this warning, although a close contemporary of Suetonius, was immeasurably his superior as a pathologist of autocracy –
indeed, perhaps the greatest there has ever been. Cornelius Tacitus could draw on an intimate understanding of how Rome and her empire functioned. Over the course of a glittering career, he had spoken in the law courts, governed provinces, and held the highest magistracies to which a citizen could aspire; but he had also demonstrated a canny, if inglorious, instinct for survival. The dynasty that ruled Rome as he came of age was no longer that of Augustus, which had expired amid a welter of blood back in AD 68 – but it was potentially no less murderous for that. Rather than stand up to its exactions, Tacitus had opted to keep his head down, his gaze averted. The crimes of omission in which he felt himself complicit seem never entirely to have been cleansed from his conscience. The more he came to stand at a distance from public life, the more obsessively he sought to fathom the depths of the regime under which he was obliged to live, and to track how it had evolved. First he narrated the events of his own youth and adulthood; and then, in his final and greatest work, a history that has been known since the sixteenth century as The Annals, he turned his gaze back upon the dynasty of Augustus. Augustus himself, and his fateful primacy, Tacitus chose to analyse only in the most oblique manner: by focusing, not upon the man himself, but rather upon his heirs. Four Caesars in succession accordingly took centre stage: first Tiberius; then Caligula; then Caligula’s uncle, Claudius; and finally, the last of the dynasty to rule, Augustus’s great-great-grandson, Nero. His death it was that marked the end of the line. Again and again, membership of the imperial family had been shown to come at fatal cost. By AD 68, not a single descendant of Augustus remained alive. Such was the measure of the story that Tacitus had to tell.
And of something else as well: the challenge of telling the story at all.
Mordantly, in the first paragraph of The Annals, Tacitus spelt out the problem.
‘The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified while they remained alive out of dread – and then, after their deaths, were composed under the influence of still festering hatreds.’12 Only the most diligent research, the most studied objectivity, would do. Painstaking in his efforts to study the official records of each emperor’s reign, Tacitus made equally sure never to take them on trust.*2 Words, under the Caesars, had become slippery, treacherous things. ‘The age was a tainted one, degraded by its sycophancy.’13 The bleakness of this judgement, bred as it was of personal experience, ensured that Tacitus’s bitter scepticism ended up corroding all that it touched. In The Annals, not a Caesar who claimed to be acting in the best interests of the Roman people but he was a hypocrite; not an attempt to stay true to the city’s traditions but it was a sham; not a fine-sounding sentiment
but it was a lie. Rome’s history is portrayed as a nightmare, haunted by terror and shadowed by blood, from which it is impossible for her citizens to awake.
It is a portrait of despotism that many subsequent generations, witnessing the dimming of their own liberties, have not been slow to recognise. Wherever a tyranny has been planted on the ruins of a previously free order, and whenever specious slogans have been used to mask state-sanctioned crimes, it has been remembered. The dynasty of Augustus still defines the look of autocratic power.
That it should so haunt the public imagination comes, then, as little surprise. When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first Caesars that is most likely to come into their minds. There is no other period of ancient history that can compare for sheer unsettling fascination with its gallery of leading characters. Their lurid glamour has resulted in them becoming the very archetypes of feuding and murderous dynasts. Monsters such as we find in the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius seem sprung from some fantasy novel or TV box-set: Tiberius, grim, paranoid, and with a taste for having his testicles licked by young boys in swimming pools; Caligula, lamenting that the Roman people did not have a single neck, so that he might cut it through; Agrippina, the mother of Nero, scheming to bring to power the son who would end up having her murdered; Nero himself, kicking his pregnant wife to death, marrying a eunuch, and raising a pleasure palace over the fire-gutted centre of Rome. For those who like their tales of dynastic back-stabbing spiced up with poison and exotic extremes of perversion, the story might well seem to have everything. Murderous matriarchs, incestuous powercouples, downtrodden beta males who nevertheless end up wielding powers of life and death: all these staples of recent dramas are to be found in the sources for the period. The first Caesars, more than any comparable dynasty, remain to this day household names. Their celebrity holds.
All of which, it is as well to admit, can be a cause of some embarrassment to historians of the period. Tales of poison and depravity, precisely because so melodramatic, have a tendency to make them feel uncomfortable. The more sensational a story, after all, the less plausible it is liable to seem. The truth of the allegations laid against the Julio-Claudians – as the dynasty of Augustus is conventionally known by scholars – has for this reason long provoked disagreement. Could Caligula, for instance, really have been as mad as Suetonius and other ancient authors claimed? Perhaps, rather than insane, his more flamboyant stunts had simply been garbled in the transmission? Was it possible, for instance, that behind the seeming lunacy of his order to pick up seashells there was in fact a perfectly rational explanation? Many scholars have suggested as much. Over the years, numerous theories have been
proposed. Perhaps – although no source mentions it – there had been a mutiny, and Caligula was looking to punish his soldiers by giving them some demeaning task? Or maybe he wanted them to look for pearls, or else for shells that he could then use to ornament water features? Or perhaps concha, the Latin word for ‘shell’, was in fact being used by Caligula to signify something quite different: a kind of boat, or even the genitals of a whore?
Any of these suggestions are possible; none of them is definitive. Like a vivid dream, the episode seems haunted by the sense of some unfathomable logic, some meaning that all our efforts to understand it are doomed never quite to grasp. Such is often the frustration of ancient history: that there are things we will never know for certain.
None of which need necessarily be cause for despair. Known unknowns are not without their value to the historian of the first Caesars. The question of what precisely Caligula might have been getting up to on that Gallic beach will never be settled decisively; but what we do know for certain is that Roman historians did not feel that it particularly needed an explanation. They took for granted that ordering soldiers to pick up shells was the kind of thing that a bad, mad emperor did. The stories told of Caligula – that he insulted the gods, that he took pleasure in cruelty, that he revelled in every kind of sexual deviancy – were not unique to him. Rather, they were a part of the common stock of rumour that swirled whenever a Caesar offended the proprieties of the age. ‘Leave ugly shadows alone where they lurk in their abyss of shame’:14 this po-faced admonition, delivered by an anthologist of improving stories during the reign of Tiberius, was one that few of his fellow citizens were inclined to follow. They adored gossip far too much. The anecdotes told of the imperial dynasty, holding up as they do a mirror to the deepest prejudices and terrors of those who swapped them, transport us to the heart of the Roman psyche. It is why any study of Augustus’s dynasty can never simply be that, but must also serve as something more: a portrait of the Roman people themselves.
It is also why a narrative history, one that covers the entire span of the Julio-Claudian period, offers perhaps the surest way of steering a path between the Scylla of flaccid gullibility and the Charybdis of an overly muscle-bound scepticism. Clearly, not all stories told about the early Caesars are to be trusted; but equally, many of them do provide us with a handle on what most probably inspired them. Anecdotes that can seem utterly fantastical when read in isolation often appear much less so with the perspective that a narrative provides. The evolution of autocracy in Rome was a protracted and contingent business. Augustus, although ranked by historians as the city’s first emperor, was never officially instituted as a monarch. Instead, he ruled by
virtue of rights and honours voted him in piecemeal fashion. No formal procedure ever existed to govern the succession; and this ensured that each emperor in turn, on coming to power, was left with little option but to test the boundaries of what he could and could not do. As a result, the Julio-Claudians presided over one long continuous process of experimentation. That is why I have chosen in this book to trace the entire course of the dynasty, from its foundation to its final bloody expiration. The reign of each emperor is best understood, not on its own terms, but in the context of what preceded and followed it.
And all the more so because the study of the period, as is invariably the case with ancient history, can sometimes resemble the frustration of listening to an old-fashioned car radio, with various stations forever fading in and out of audibility. If only, for instance, we had the account by Tacitus of Caligula’s actions on that beach by the Channel – but alas, we do not. Everything that The Annals had to report about the years between the death of Tiberius and the halfway stage of Claudius’s reign has been lost. That Caligula, the most notorious member of his dynasty, should also be the Julio-Claudian for whose reign the sources are the patchiest is almost certainly not a coincidence.
Although two thousand years of repetition might give us the impression that the narrative of the period has long since been settled, in many cases it has not. It remains as important, when studying ancient history, to recognise what we do not know as to tease out what we do. Readers should be aware that much of the narrative of this book, like the pontoon bridge that Caligula once built between two promontories in the Bay of Naples, spans turbulent depths.
Controversy and disagreement are endemic to the study of the period. Yet this, of course, is precisely its fascination. Over the past few decades, the range and vitality of scholarly research into the Julio-Claudians have revolutionised our understanding of their age. If this book manages to give readers even a flavour of how exciting it is to study Rome’s first imperial dynasty, then it will not have failed in its aim. Two millennia on, the West’s primal examples of tyranny continue to instruct and appal.
‘Nothing could be fainter than those torches which allow us, not to pierce the darkness, but to glimpse it.’15 So wrote Seneca, shortly before his death in AD 65. The context of his observation was a shortcut that he had recently taken while travelling along the Bay of Naples, down a gloomy and dust-choked tunnel. ‘What a prison it was, and how long. Nothing could compare with it.’ As a man who had spent many years observing the imperial court, Seneca knew all about darkness. Caligula, resentful of his brilliance, had only narrowly been dissuaded from having him put to death; Claudius, offended by his adulterous affair with one of Caligula’s sisters, had banished him to
Corsica; Agrippina, looking for someone to rein in the vicious instincts of her son, had appointed him Nero’s tutor. Seneca, who would ultimately be compelled by his erstwhile student to slit his own veins, had no illusions as to the nature of the regime he served. Even the peace that it had brought the world, he declared, had ultimately been founded upon nothing more noble than ‘the exhaustion of cruelty’.16 Despotism had been implicit in the new order from its very beginning.
Yet what he detested Seneca also adored. Contempt for power did not inhibit him from revelling in it. The darkness of Rome was lit by gold. Two thousand years on, we too, looking back to Augustus and his heirs, can recognise in their mingling of tyranny and achievement, sadism and glamour, power-lust and celebrity, an aureate quality such as no dynasty since has ever quite managed to match.
‘Caesar and the state are one and the same.’17
How this came to be so is a story no less compelling, no less remarkable and no less salutary than it has ever been these past two thousand years.
*1 The earliest portrait of a living Roman on a Roman coin seems to have been of Julius Caesar. It was minted in 44 BC – the year, not coincidentally, of his assassination.
*2 The recent discovery in Spain of a decree issued under Tiberius has shed intriguing light on Tacitus’s methods. There can be no doubt that he had detailed knowledge of its wording; nor that he fully appreciated the degree to which it expressed, not the truth, but rather what those who had composed it wished to be taken for the truth.
Guard, preserve and protect the way things now stand: the peace we enjoy, and our emperor. And when he has done his duty, after a life that I pray may be as long as possible, grace him with successors whose shoulders will prove as sufficient to support the burden of our global empire as we have found his to be.
–Velleius Paterculus (c. 20 BC–C. AD 31)
The stain of the wrongs committed back in ancient times by these men Will never fade from the history books. Until the very end of time, The monstrous deeds of the House of Caesar will stand condemned.
–Claudian (c. AD 370–404)
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I
PADRONE
1
CHILDREN OF THE WOLF
The Making of a Superpower
The story of Rome began with a rape. A princess, a consecrated virgin, was surprised and ravished. Various accounts were given of the fateful assault.
Some said that it happened in her sleep, when she dreamed that a man of miraculous beauty led her down to a shady river bank, and abandoned her there lost and alone. Others claimed that she was seized in the middle of a thunderstorm, while collecting water from a sacred grove. One story even told of a mysterious phallus which sprang up from the ashes of the royal hearth and took, not the princess, but her slavegirl. All were agreed, though, on the resulting pregnancy; and most – a few curmudgeonly revisionists aside – had no doubt that the rapist was a god. *1 Mars, the Spiller of Blood, had planted his seed in a mortal womb.
Two god-like boys were duly born of the rape. These twins, the offspring of their mother’s shame, had no sooner been delivered than they were dumped into a nearby river, the Tiber. Still the wonders did not cease. Swept along on the floodwaters of the river, the box to which the two babies had been consigned eventually ran aground below a steep hill named the Palatine.
There, in the mouth of a cave, beneath the dripping, fruit-laden branches of a fig tree, the twins were discovered by a she-wolf; and the wolf, rather than devouring them, licked them clean of mud and offered their hungry mouths its teats. A passing swineherd, witnessing this miraculous scene, came clambering down the slopes of the Palatine to their rescue. The she-wolf slunk off. The two boys, rescued by the swineherd and given the names Remus and Romulus, grew up to become peerless warriors. In due course, standing on the Palatine, Romulus had seen twelve eagles: a sure sign from the gods that he should found, there on the summit of the hill, the city which ever afterwards
bore his name. It was he who ruled Rome as its first king.
This, at any rate, was the story told centuries later by the Roman people to explain the origins of their city, and the sheer glorious scale of their martial achievements. Foreigners, when they learnt of it, certainly found it all too plausible. That Romulus had been fathered by Mars, the god of war, and suckled by a she-wolf appeared – to those brought into bruising contact with his descendants – to explain much about the Roman character.1 Even a people like the Macedonians, who under Alexander the Great had themselves conquered a vast empire, almost to the rising of the sun, knew that the Romans were a breed of men quite unlike any other. One brief, opening skirmish, fought to indecisive effect in 200 BC, had been enough to bring this home. Five centuries and more had passed since the age of Romulus – and yet there still clung to the Romans, so it appeared to their opponents, something of the chilling quality of creatures bred of myth. The Macedonians, retrieving their dead from the battlefield, had been appalled by the shambles they discovered there. Bodies mutilated and dismembered by Roman swords had soaked the earth with blood. Arms with the shoulders still attached, severed heads, reeking puddles of viscera: all bore witness to a pitch of violence more bestial than human. No blaming the Macedonians, then, for the panic they had felt that day, ‘when they discovered the kind of weapons and the order of men they had to face’. 2 A dread of lycanthropes, after all, was only natural in civilised people. The wolvish nature of the Romans, the hint of claws beneath their fingernails and of a yellow stare behind their eyes, was one that people across the span of the Mediterranean, and far beyond, had learned to take for granted. ‘Why, they admit themselves that their founders were suckled on the milk of a she-wolf!’ Such was the desperate rallying cry of one king before his realm too was dragged down to ruin. ‘It is only to be expected that they should all of them have the hearts of wolves. They are inveterately thirsty for blood, and insatiable in their greed. Their lusting after power and riches has no limits!’3
The Romans themselves, of course, saw things rather differently. It was the gods, they believed, who had granted them their mastery of the world. The genius of Rome was for rule. Yes, there might be those who excelled in other fields. Who, for instance, could rival the Greeks when it came to the shaping of bronze or marble, the mapping of the stars or the penning of sex manuals?
Syrians were pre-eminent as dancers; Chaldaeans as astrologers; Germans as bodyguards. Only the Roman people, though, possessed the talents sufficient to conquer and maintain a universal empire. Their achievements brooked no argument. When it came to the sparing of the subjected, and the crushing of
the haughty, they reigned supreme.
The roots of this greatness, so they believed, reached back to their very beginnings. ‘The affairs of Rome are founded upon her ancient customs and the quality of her men. ’4 From the earliest days, the measure of the city’s prowess had been the readiness of her citizens to sacrifice everything in the cause of the common good – even their lives. Romulus, building a wall around his foundation and ploughing a furrow, the pomerium, to hallow all that lay within it as ground sacred to Jupiter, king of the gods, had known that more was needed to render Rome truly inviolable. So Remus, his twin, had willingly offered himself up as a human sacrifice. Jumping across the boundary, he had been struck down with a shovel; ‘and thereby, with his death, he had consecrated the fortifications of the new city’.5 The primal earth and mortar of Rome had been fertilised by the blood of the war god’s son.
Remus was the first to die for the good of the city – but certainly not the last. Five kings followed Romulus on the throne of Rome; and when the sixth, Tarquin the Proud, proved himself a vicious tyrant more than deserving of his nickname, his subjects put their lives on the line and rose in rebellion. In 509
BC, the monarchy was ended for good. The man who had led the uprising, a cousin of Tarquin’s named Brutus, obliged the Roman people to swear a collective oath, ‘that they would never again allow a single man to reign in Rome’. From that moment on, the word ‘king’ was the dirtiest in their political vocabulary. No longer subjects, they ranked instead as cives,
‘citizens’. Now, at last, they were free to show their mettle. ‘They began to walk taller, and to display their abilities to full advantage – for it is the nature of kings that they will hold good men in more suspicion than the bad, and dread the talents of others.’6 No longer was there any need, in a city liberated from the jealous gaze of a monarch, to veil its citizens’ yearning for glory.
The measure of true achievement had become the praise of the Roman people.
Even the humblest peasant, if he were not to see himself reflected in the mirror of his fellows’ scorn, was obliged to shoulder his duties as a citizen, and prove himself a man – a vir.
Virtus, the quality of a vir, was the ultimate Roman ideal, that lustrous fusion of energy and courage which the Romans themselves identified as their chiefest strength. Even the gods concurred. In 362 BC, a century and a half after the downfall of Tarquin the Proud, a terrifying portent afflicted the centre of Rome. Below the Palatine, in the level expanse of paved ground known as the Forum, a great chasm opened up. Nothing could have been more calculated to strike terror into Roman hearts. The Forum was the very hub of civic life. It was where statesmen addressed the people, where
magistrates dispensed justice, where merchants hawked their goods, and where virgins consecrated to the service of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, tended an eternal flame. That a gateway to the underworld had opened up in a place so fundamental to Roman life clearly betokened something terrible: the anger of the gods.
And so it proved. A sacrifice was demanded: ‘the most precious thing you possess’.7 What, though, was Rome’s most precious possession? The question provoked much scratching of heads – until at length a young man named
Marcus Curtius spoke up. Manliness and courage, he told his fellow citizens, were the greatest riches possessed by the Roman people. Then, arrayed in full armour, he climbed onto his horse, spurred it forward and made straight for the abyss. Over its edge he galloped. He and his horse plunged together into its depths. The chasm duly closed. A pool and a single olive tree were left to mark the spot, abiding memorials to a citizen who had perished that his fellows might live.
So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government. It enabled the blaze of an individual citizen’s longing for honour, his determination to test body and spirit in the crucible of adversity and emerge from every ordeal triumphant, to coexist with an iron sense of discipline. The consequences of this, for the Republic’s neighbours, were invariably devastating. By 200 BC, when the Macedonians experienced for the first time the wolf-like savagery of which the legions were capable, Rome was already mistress of the western Mediterranean. Two years previously, her armies had delivered a knockout blow to the one power that had presumed to rival her for the title: a metropolis of merchant-princes on the coast of North Africa by the name of Carthage. Rome’s victory had been an epochal triumph.
The death struggle between the two cities had lasted, on and off, for over sixty years. In that time, war had reached the gates of Rome herself. Italy had been soaked in blood. ‘The convulsive turmoil of the conflict had brought the whole world to shake.’8 Ultimately, though, after a trial that would have seen any other people suing desperately for terms, the victors had emerged so battle-hardened as to seem forged of iron. Small surprise, then, that even the heirs of Alexander the Great should have found the legions impossible to withstand. King after king in the eastern Mediterranean had been brought to grovel before Roman magistrates. Weighed against a free and disciplined republic, monarchy seemed to have been found decisively wanting. ‘Our emotions are governed by our minds.’ So the ambassadors of one defeated king were sternly informed. ‘These never alter – no matter what fortune may bring us. Just as adversity has never brought us low, so have we never been puffed up by success.’9
The man who spoke these words, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was certainly in a position to know. He was the epitome of success. His nickname,
‘Africanus’, bore stirring witness to his role as the conqueror of Rome’s deadliest foe. It was he who had wrested Spain from the Carthaginians, defeated them in their own backyard, and then brought them to accept the most abject terms. A few years later, on the state roll of citizens, the name of
Scipio appeared resplendent at the top of the list. This, in a society such as Rome’s, was an honour like no other. Hierarchy was a defining obsession of the Roman people. All were officially graded according to a sliding scale of rank. The status of a citizen was calibrated with severe precision. Wealth, family and achievement combined to pinpoint precisely where, within the exacting class system of the Republic, each and every Roman stood. Even at the summit of society, status was ferociously patrolled. The highest-ranking citizens of all were enrolled in their own exclusive order: the Senate. This required of its members, in addition to riches and social standing, a record of service as magistrates sufficient to qualify them to be the arbiters of Rome’s destiny. So sensitive, and so influential, were their deliberations that ‘for many centuries not a senator breathed a word of them in public’.10 As a result, unless a statesman could make his voice heard among their counsels, he might just as well have been dumb. Yet the right of a senator to speak to his fellows was not a given. The men called first in debate were always those who, by virtue of their pedigree, their moral standing and their service to the state, had accumulated the greatest prestige. Auctoritas, the Romans termed this quality
– and the Republic, by placing Scipio first on the roll of its citizens, was granting its backing to the prodigious heft of his authority. The conqueror of Carthage had, by universal consent, ‘attained a unique and dazzling glory’. 11
Even among the ranks of Rome’s highest achievers, Scipio Africanus was acknowledged to have no rival. He was Princeps Senatus, ‘the First Man of the Senate’.
Yet in this primacy lurked peril. The shadow cast by Scipio over his fellow citizens was one that could not help but provoke resentment. The guiding principle of the Republic remained what it had always been: that no one man should rule supreme in Rome. To the Roman people, the very appearance of a magistrate served as a reminder of the seductions and dangers of monarchy.
The purple that lined the border of his toga had originally been the colour of kingship. ‘Lictors’ – bodyguards whose duty it was to clear a path for him through the crowds of his fellow citizens – had once similarly escorted Tarquin the Proud. The rods and single axe borne by each lictor on his shoulder – the fasces, as they were known – symbolised authority of an intimidatingly regal scope: the right to inflict both corporal and capital punishment.*2 Power of this order was an awesome and treacherous thing.
Only with the most extreme precautions in place could anyone in a free republic be trusted to wield it. This was why, in the wake of the monarchy’s downfall, the powers of the banished king had been allocated, not to a single magistrate, but to two: the consuls. Like a strong wine, the splendour of the
consulship, and the undying glory that it brought to those who won it, required careful prior dilution. Not only could each consul be relied upon to keep a watchful eye upon the other, but the term of a consulship was set at a single year. The prestige enjoyed by Scipio, though, dazzled in defiance of any such limits. Even the grandest of the Republic’s elected magistrates were liable to find themselves diminished before it. The Senate House, as a result, began to sound with mutterings against the Princeps.
The truth was that glamour, in the Republic, had always been regarded with deep suspicion. Crow’s feet and flintiness of manner were what the Roman people expected of their statesmen. The very word ‘senator’ derived from the Latin for ‘old man’. The meteor of Scipio’s career, though, had blazed from a scandalously youthful age. He had been appointed to the command against the Carthaginians in Spain when he was only twenty-six. He had won his first consulship a mere five years later. Even his elevation to the rank of Princeps Senatus had come at an age when other senators, far below him in the foothills of achievement, were still scrabbling after junior magistracies.
Forging a dashing career of conquest before the jowls had begun to sag was, of course, what Alexander had so ringingly accomplished. Resentful senators were hardly reassured by this reflection. Alexander, after all, had been a foreigner – and a king. Renowned as he was for the god-like scale of his ambitions, it was unsettling to many senators that the self-promotion of such a troubling figure should have been aped by one of their own. Scipio, it was claimed, had been fathered on his mother by a snake; had won his victory in Spain thanks to the timely assistance of a god; had only to cross the Forum late at night for dogs to cease to bark. Princeps he may have been, but stories such as these implied a status that was off the scale.
And as such, intolerable. In 187 BC, when Scipio returned from a campaign in the East, his enemies were waiting for him. He was charged with embezzlement. Ripping up his account books before the full gaze of the Senate, Scipio indignantly reminded his accusers of all the treasure that he had won for Rome. It made no difference. Rather than risk the humiliation of conviction, the Princeps retired for good to his country estate. There, in 183
BC, he died a broken man. The fundamental principle of political life in the Republic had been brutally illustrated: ‘that no one citizen should be permitted an eminence so formidable that it prevents him from being questioned by the laws’. 12 Even a man as great as Scipio Africanus had found it impossible, in the final reckoning, to argue with that.
Wolf-bred the Romans may have been – but the future of the Republic, and of its liberties, appeared secure.
The Great Game
Or was it?
Scipio had submitted to the laws of the Republic – that much was true.
Nevertheless, the sheer potency of his charisma hinted that the advance of the Republic to superpower status might not be without its pitfalls. Scipio’s opponents had prided themselves on an obdurate provincialism. They took for granted that Rome’s ancient customs were the best. Already, though, the limits of such conservatism were becoming apparent. Scipio was merely an outrider. The increasing tangle of Rome’s diplomatic commitments, the incomparable proficiency of her legions, and her refusal to tolerate so much as a suggestion of disrespect combined to present her leading citizens with temptations of literally global scope. A century and more after the death of Scipio, the new darling of the Roman people had won for himself wealth and celebrity beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations. Pompeius Magnus
– ‘Pompey the Great’ – could boast a career that had fused illegality and self-aggrandisement to sensational effect. At the age of twenty-three, he had raised his own private army. A series of glamorous and lucrative commands had followed. Not for the man once nicknamed ‘the youthful butcher’13 the grind of a conventional career. Startlingly, he managed to win his first consulship –
at the tender age of thirty-six – without ever having joined the Senate.
Even worse outrages were to follow. The proprieties of the Republic were trampled down in cavalier fashion. In 67 BC, Pompey was given a command that, for the first time, embraced the entire Mediterranean. A year later, he went one better by obtaining for himself carte blanche to impose direct rule over vast swathes of enticingly unannexed territory. The eastern reaches of Asia Minor, as the Romans called what is now Turkey, and the whole of Syria were gobbled up. Pompey was hailed as ‘The Conqueror of all Nations’. 14
When he finally returned to Italy, in 62 BC, he came trailing more than glory in his wake. Kings were his clients and kingdoms his to milch. His legions owed their loyalty, not to the Republic, but to the man who had enabled them to asset-strip the East: their triumphant general, their imperator. As for Pompey himself, he had no time for false modesty: riding through the streets of Rome, he posed and preened in the cloak of Alexander the Great.
No one, not even the most embittered conservative, could deny his pre-eminence. ‘One and all acknowledge his unrivalled status as Princeps.’15
Unlike Scipio, Pompey did not owe this title to any vote of the Senate.
Instead, like the incense he had brought back in groaning wagon trains from the East, his auctoritas hung dense over Rome, perfumed and intangible. The
length and scope of Pompey’s campaigning had made a mockery of the traditional rhythms of political life in the Republic. The prospect of sharing his commands with a colleague, or of having them limited to a single year at a time, had never crossed his mind. What was the Senate, that it should hobble
‘the tamer of the world’? 16 Pompey had secured his victories, not despite, but because of his criminality. The implications were unsettling in the extreme.
Laws that had served Rome well in the days of her provincialism were palpably starting to buckle now that she ruled the world. The same kings who crept and cringed in Pompey’s train only served to demonstrate what dazzling pickings might be on offer to a citizen prepared to disdain the venerable safeguards against monarchy. Rome’s greatness, long treasured by her citizens as the fruit of their liberty, now appeared to be menacing the Republic with the decay of its freedoms.
Except that Pompey, despite his muscle, had no wish to impose himself upon his fellow citizens at the point of a sword. Though he had always been greedy for power and fame, there were boundaries that even he flinched from crossing. A dominance that did not rest upon the approbation of his peers was a dominance not worth having. Military despotism was out of the question.
Greatness, in the Republic, was nothing unless defined by the respect of the Senate and the Roman people. Pompey wanted it all. It was this that gave his enemies their chance. Though too intimidated by the resources available to the new Princeps to launch a prosecution against him, they could certainly deny him their co-operation. The result was paralysis. Pompey, to his shock and indignation, found his measures blocked in the Senate, his settlements left unratified, his achievements sneered at and dismissed. Politics as normal? So Pompey’s enemies dared to hope. The one abiding constant of life in the Republic, it seemed, still held true. No one so overweening that he might not be taken down a peg or two.
A few of Pompey’s chief rivals, though, when they studied the crisis afflicting their city, did so with a more pitiless and predatory gaze. No less than their fellow senators, they were prompted by the spectacle of a fellow citizen holding the gorgeous East in fee to bitter emotions of jealousy and fear; but what they could also recognise in it was the dawning of an intoxicating new age of possibility. No longer was a mere consulship to be reckoned the summit of a Roman’s ambition. Appetite was coming to exceed the capacity of the Republic’s institutions to sate it. Prizes on a global scale now appeared tantalisingly within reach: ‘the sea, the land, the course of the stars’.17 All it needed was the nerve to reach out and seize them.
In 60 BC, as Pompey’s enemies continued to snarl and snap at the heels of
the great man, two of Rome’s most formidable operators were plotting a manoeuvre of momentous audacity. Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius Julius Caesar were men whose envy of the Princeps was exceeded only by their determination to emulate him. Both had good cause to set their sights high.
Crassus had long sat like a spider at the heart of a monstrous web. A proven general and a former consul, his auctoritas was nevertheless a thing of shadow as well as brilliance. Like Pompey, he had recognised that the surest wellsprings of power in Rome were no longer the traditional ones. Although perfectly at home on the stage of public life, his true genius was for pulling strings from behind the scenes. Rich beyond the dreams of anyone in Rome, and displaying consistency only in his infinite capacity for opportunism, Crassus had employed his seemingly inexhaustible wealth to ensnare an entire generation of men on the make. Most, once they accepted his credit, then found it impossible to clear the interest. It took a man of rare political talent to break free and emerge as a player in his own right.
Such a man was Caesar. In 60 BC, he was forty years old: the scion of an ancient but faded family, notorious for his profligate dandyism and massively in debt. No one, though, not even his enemies – of whom there were plenty –
could deny his talents. Charm fused with ruthlessness, dash with determination, to potent effect. Although clearly the inferior of Crassus, let alone Pompey, in terms of resources and reputation, what Caesar could offer the two men was a firm grip on the official reins of power. In 59, he was due to serve as one of the two elected consuls of the Republic. Clearly, with the combined backing of Pompey and Crassus behind him, and with his own ineffable qualities of cool and resolve to draw upon, he would be able –
however illegally – to neutralise his consular colleague. The consulship would become, in effect, that of ‘Julius and Caesar’.18 He and his two allies would then be able to ram through a whole hit-list of measures. Pompey, Crassus, Caesar: all were likely to profit splendidly from their three-headed partnership.
And so it proved. Subsequent generations would distinguish in the birth of this ‘triumvirate’ a development as fateful as it was ominous: ‘the forging of a conspiracy to take captive the Republic’. 19 In truth, the three dynasts were doing nothing that political heavyweights had not been busy at for centuries.
Business had always been conducted in Rome by the fashioning of alliances, the doing-down of rivals. Nevertheless, the consulship of Julius and Caesar did indeed constitute a fatal waymark in her history. When Caesar’s heavies emptied a bucket of shit over the rival consul, beat up his lictors, and strong-armed the wretched man into effective retirement, it heralded a year of
illegalities so blatant that no conservative would ever forget or forgive them.
That the deals forced through by Caesar served the interests of his two allies quite as much as his own did not prevent the consul himself from being held principally to blame. His foes were now viscerally committed to his destruction. Caesar, no less passionately, was committed to the pursuit of greatness.
Understandably, then, he had made sure while still consul to book for himself the most splendid insurance policy possible: a governorship of tremendous scope. In the spring of 58, Caesar headed north to take command of three whole provinces: one in the Balkans, one directly on the northern frontier of Italy, and one on the far side of the Alps, in southern Gaul. Here, he could reckon himself secure from his enemies. It was forbidden for any magistrate of the Roman people to be brought to trial – and Caesar’s term as governor had been set at a constitutionally outrageous five years. In due course, it would end up double that.
The junior partner of Pompey and Crassus Caesar may have been – but neither had succeeded in leveraging their alliance to more promising effect than the new governor of Gaul. A decade’s worth of immunity from prosecution was only the start. Equally priceless were the opportunities offered for glory-hunting. Beyond the Alps, and the limits of Roman power, lay the wilds of Gallia Comata, ‘Long-Haired Gaul’. Here dwelt teeming hordes of barbarians: spike-haired, seminude warriors much given to sticking the heads of their enemies on posts and downing their liquor neat. For centuries, they had embodied the Republic’s darkest nightmares; but Caesar –
boldly, brilliantly, illegally – had no sooner arrived in Gaul than he was looking to conquer the lot. His campaigns were on a devastating scale. A million people, so it was said, perished over their course. A million more were enslaved. For a decade, blood and smoke were general over Gaul. By the end of Caesar’s term as governor, all the tribes, from the Rhine to the Ocean, had been broken upon his sword. Even the Germans and the Britons, savages on the edge of the world whose prowess was as proverbial as it was exotic, had been taught respect for Roman arms. Meanwhile, back in the capital, Caesar’s fellow citizens thrilled to the lavishness of their new hero’s generosity, and to the sensational news of his exploits. Caesar himself, rich in fame and plunder, and with an army of battle-seasoned legions at his back, had won for himself by 50 BC an auctoritas fit to rival that of Pompey. His enemies in the Senate, counting down the days until he finally relinquished his governorship, knew now more than ever that they could not afford to miss their chance.
To Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul, the prospect of being harried through law
courts by a crew of pygmies was intolerable. Rather than suffer such a humiliation, his intention was to move seamlessly from provincial command to a second consulship. To achieve this, though, he would need allies – and much had changed during his absence from Rome. The triumvirate had only ever been as strong as its three legs – and, by 50 BC, one of those legs was gone. Four years earlier, Crassus had left for Syria. Desperate to follow the trail blazed by Pompey and Caesar, he had secured a command against the Parthians, the one people in the Near East still presumptuous enough to defy Roman hegemony. The expedition had promised pickings splendid enough to satisfy even Rome’s most notoriously avaricious man. The Parthians ruled an empire that was fabulously wealthy. It stretched from the Indian Ocean, that
‘pearl-bearing sea’,20 to the uplands of Persia, where, it was confidently reported, there stood a mountain made entirely of gold, to Mesopotamia, where untold luxuries – silks, and perfumes, and aromatic drinking-cups –
were available in its teeming markets.
Unfortunately, though, the Parthians were not only rich, but underhand.
Rather than stand and fight, they preferred to shoot arrows from horseback, repeatedly wheeling and retreating as they did so. The invaders, ponderous and sweaty, had found themselves helpless against this womanish tactic. In 53
BC, trapped on a baking plain outside the Mesopotamian border town of Carrhae, Crassus and thirty thousand of his men had been wiped out. The eagles, silver representations of the holy bird of Jupiter which served each legion as its symbol and its standard, had fallen into enemy hands. Together with Crassus’s head, they had ended up as trophies at the Parthian court. To dare, it turned out, was not always to win.
As for Rome, the damage inflicted upon her by the defeat at Carrhae was even more grievous than had at first appeared. A body-blow had been struck which threatened the stability of the entire Republic. With Crassus gone, the field of players in the great game of Roman politics had narrowed at a perilous moment. It was not only conservatives, resolved to preserve the fabric of the state’s functioning and its traditions, who felt threatened by the brilliance of Caesar’s achievements. So too did his surviving triumviral partner, Pompey the Great. As Caesar and his enemies in Rome manoeuvred with increasing desperation for advantage, both were in direct competition for the support of the Princeps. This, although it played to the great man’s vanity, also left him feeling subtly diminished. Caesar or Caesar’s enemies: the terms of the most excruciating choice that Pompey had ever been obliged to make were being defined for him by his erstwhile junior partner. That being so, the rupture between the two men was, perhaps, in the final reckoning, inevitable.
In December of 50 BC, when one of the two consuls for the year travelled to
Pompey’s villa outside Rome, presented him with a sword, and charged him to wield it against Caesar in defence of the Republic, Pompey replied that he would – ‘if no other way can be found’. 21 This reply alone helped to ensure that it would not. Caesar, given the choice whether to submit to the law and surrender his command, or to stand firm in defence of his auctoritas and declare civil war, barely hesitated. Not for him the self-restraint of a Scipio.
On 10 January, 49 BC, he and one of his legions crossed the Rubicon, a small river that marked the frontier of his province with Italy. The die was cast.