A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (11 page)

Gladiators, who had performed originally as part of a funeral offering from a pious son in memory of his parent, had become so significant that there was even a profession,
auctoreamentus
gladiatorium,
and the trainer, the
lanista,
of gladiators (a synonym in Etruscan for butcher or executioner) could become rich and powerful, though never socially acceptable; for though
Romans, ‘from first to last spectators, and not, like the Greeks at their best, actors’, hugely enjoyed the combat, they were not proud of their gladiators. None, for instance, ever
figured on a coin. They were, however, admired, and lovesick tributes have been found on the walls of Pompeii. Occasionally, like the pugs in eighteenth-century England, they survived, and have
been caricatured limping through the salons of older and voracious Roman ladies, with their rheumy eyes, scarred bodies and missing ears, objects of contempt, not compassion.

Pliny was bored by the Games; Cicero was in favour, with reservations; Claudius, a gibbering, snivelling weakling, but, as we shall see, immensely cunning, adored them as much as the most
voyeuristic of his subjects; Caligula was obsessed by gladiators and once fought an opponent armed with a wooden sword, only to despatch him in due course with a real one. Only Seneca
protested.

The joy in cruelty, the cruel joy wafting up from this hostile telling of the Romans at play, shows that the crowd was sadistic, like many crowds, though that concept, with its
sexual undertones and subsequent possible feelings of guilt, would have been, like masochism, unknown. The Roman lust for blood was equally uncomplicated and prodigious. Tigers
and lions were first introduced to the arena in 184
BC
and were an instant hit. Cicero wrote that the ‘wild beasts were magnificent’, though he noticed the crowd
felt sympathy towards the elephant. Respect for wild animals is a very modern phenomenon and the Romans felt none. There were, after all, in the Empire, plenty more lions, tigers, bears, ostriches,
and even crocodiles, where they came from. They cost a lot to assemble and were only offered at
munera
– the extravagant shows mounted by grandees like Pompey and Agrippa and, of
course, the Emperors – as opposed to the
ludi,
attended daily by Caligula,
¹⁸
where deaths were only human. (These, especially the sea battles,
when thousands fought to the end on artificial water, could mount up and yield a satisfying glut of blood.)

The Roman Games, beginning as pious memorials, ended in an impious killing, when a (subsequent) Christian martyr, a monk called Telemachus, endeavoured to interpose himself between two
gladiators in the year
AD
402. The presiding
praetor
, who had probably paid for the event, had him instantly despatched, but when the current Emperor, Honorius, heard
of this unhappy interruption, as it might have been represented, he banned the Games and they were never revived.

The elected officials – the
aediles
,
quaestors
and
praetors
who ran Rome and the Empire – were obliged to pay for the Games and were voted money by the treasury,
but if they did not double it they could be accused of embezzlement – a
very Roman arrangement. The Games were as significant a feature of Roman life for high and low as
the baths, the aqueduct (which the poor would illegally tap into) and the dole. Citizens used the occasions to voice with impunity their grievances to officials and to the Emperor. Everyone knew
how much they cost and who had paid what. The public of the Games was the public of the electors, and friends of a young
aedile
on the first rung of the political ladder would stump up so
that their chum could put on a good show.

Finally; many Roman citizens had no regular employment and spent their day gossiping, cadging, watching trials and so on – all, unless they were rich, outside and not in the dirty, smelly
tenements where they slept. Since holidays increased from two months at the beginning of the Empire to three under Tiberius, four in the second century and six in the late Empire, there could have
been no better way of passing the time than attending the Games.

JULIUS CAESAR

Julius Caesar grew up when the Senate and People of Rome constituted the most powerful state on earth, when the overcrowded capital could barely contain the millions of
inhabitants of whom only a quarter were citizens entitled to the corn dole, when the ancient Roman virtues of modesty and probity were being smothered by the fruits of conquest, where the checks
and balances in government created over 400 years were strained by civil war, the prescriptions and proscriptions of dictators, the demands of victorious generals and their land-hungry
veterans.

Cicero believed a consenus of high-minded citizens (senators), with the plebs kept in their place, electing even higher-minded officials (consuls like himself), could still govern Rome and its
provinces. Julius Caesar was one of those high-spirited Romans who believed only in themselves, in their sole capacity to restore law and order.

In modern terms, Cicero was on the right,
optimate,
and Caesar on the left,
popularis.
In their opposing views they represent the conflicts of the later Republic, which was finally
finished off when Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian became the Emperor Augustus. However, even he believed in the Republic; and the slogan of all who led an army to march on Rome was, ‘The
Republic is in danger. Follow me, I can save it.’

Marius, the country squire with no Greek, the populist general who remodelled the army; Sulla, his impoverished aristocratic protégé, once down to one slave,
who turned on his patron and became dictator; Pompey the Great; Mark Antony the triumvir; Julius Caesar and Octavian: all professed belief in republican principles as they murdered them and each
other. Sulla hounded Marius to death; Caesar fell out with his fellow triumvir Pompey and caused his death; Brutus, Caesar’s friend and former companion at arms, ‘the noblest Roman of
them all’, with Cassius, another friend, assassinated Caesar; Octavian, in revenge, killed them both, provoked Antony’s suicide and left Cleopatra to kill herself. Only Sulla retired to
die in his bed, and Augustus lived long enough for his crimes to be forgotten and for him to become, on the instant of his death, a god. Sulla, coming from nowhere, was the most successful,
Augustus was the most effective, but Julius Caesar was the most famous.

Gaius, his first name
(praenomen),
Julius, his clan
(gens),
Caesar, his nickname
(cognomen),
was the boldest man in history. ‘Caesar’ simply meant head of hair,
ironic because both he and his great-nephew suffered from baldness – Caesar treasuring the right to wear a laurel wreath on his and Augustus wearing a sombrero-like straw hat to conceal his.
Caesar was a bald dandy, Augustus wore homespun from the looms of his household women.

Julius Caesar was blessed with a patrician mother, Aurelia, who had enough money to set him up on the
cursus honorum
– a political career – and lived long enough, till
seventy, to see her boy conquer Gaul. It is unlikely that he was delivered by a ‘Caesarean’ because although that operation sometimes saved the child, the mother rarely survived. Caesar
was a graceful, courteous young man with strong but delicate features and the eyes of an eagle. His grandfather, also Gaius
Julius Caesar, had married his granddaughter Julia
to the country squire Marius, who had jumped from his provincial background to a governorship in northern Spain. There he acquired mines and was therefore rich but not well enough connected to make
consular rank. In exchange for her hand, Marius paid for her brother’s first step on the political ladder as
aedile
(town councillor) and dowered her – a standard Roman
arrangement. It worked. Marius grew in political credibility and honoured his understanding with his in-laws, making Julius Caesar a priest of the cult Jupiter,
¹⁹
at the age of nineteen.

In the same year he married a daughter of Cinna, another strong man in Rome – not a tactful move because Cinna’s star was fading and his enemy, the implacable and victorious Sulla,
demanded he divorce. Caesar refused and was only saved by his mama, who lobbied the influential Vestal Virgins. Caesar never obeyed any other man and this early gesture was typical. When a
successful general he continued to take risks, appearing like an OAS parachutist behind enemy lines without an escort, climbing aboard an enemy ship by himself, threatening alone an entire nest of
pirates with crucifixion, armed only with audacity, with boldness as his only friend.

Dodging Sulla’s long arm he joined the army and won a medal for saving another soldier’s life at the siege of Mytilene, then he went to Bithynia to serve under
– malicious tongues said literally – the client King Nicomedes. A whiff of homosexuality lingered around Caesar throughout his life, refuted by his most doting biographer, John Buchan;
but how about this, rather sweet, vignette from Suetonius:

(Whatever became of Masintha?)

Caesar had begun his political career, traditionally, as a prosecutor in the law courts, but was unremarkable, so decided to go to Rhodes to study oratory under Cicero’s tutor Apollonius
Molon. On the way he was captured by pirates, who plagued the Mediterranean – the Romans were never too good at sea – until destroyed by Pompey. Then followed the incident related above with
Caesar insisting on upping the ransom from twenty to fifty talents, displaying (typically) his insolence, dependence on others for money, his resolution and his triumph – for he did indeed
return to crucify his captors, having first considerately had their throats cut.

He returned to Rome in a fast ship, dreaming of power and nearly thirty years of age. He became
aedile
, attacked the establishment in the form of Pompey and Crassus, bombarded
the plebs with money and became
quaestor
and superintendent of the Appian Way, offices which allowed him to show off with silver cages the wild beasts at the circuses. Cicero
spotted the ‘deep and dangerous designs under the smiles of his benignity’ (Plutarch). ‘I perceive an inclination for tyranny in all his projects, but on the other hand when I see
him adjusting his hair with so much exactness and scratching his head with one finger I can hardly think that such a man can conceive so vast and fatal design as the destruction of the Roman
Commonwealth.’ (Nicely observed!)