Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus (6 page)

While the Roman response at Vercellae sent a clear warning to would-be invaders of Italy to ‘keep out’, it was the Romans themselves who now threatened the hard-won peace across the peninsula. In 91 BCE a dispute broke out between the Romans and their Italian allies over the issue of rights granted by citizenship and equal treatment before the courts in Rome. The disagreement led to what became known as the War of the Allies or Social War (
Bellum Sociorum
).
³²
Marius was given command of the Roman army, but fearing he would grow too powerful, and perhaps now in poor health, he was persuaded to relinquish it. Cornelius Sulla took over leadership of the Roman forces and led them to victory in 88 BCE. A new threat, meanwhile, had emerged when Mithradates VI of Pontus laid claim on Rome’s dominions in Asia Minor and Greece. Tragically, the Romans’ response to the threat split along society class lines. The Plebeian Council (see
Appendix 1
) voted unanimously for Marius to lead the war against Mithradates, but the Senate supported Sulla.
³³
He refused to accept the validity of the popular vote and civil war ensued. Sulla’s army marched directly on Rome, took the city and asserted his right to rule. It was the first time that a Roman commander had committed this act of treason against the
Res Publica
. Once in control, he declared Marius an enemy of the state (
hostis publicus
) and forced him into exile.
³⁴
Sulla then promptly left Rome to fight the war in the East. Meanwhile, aided by his ally L. Cornelius Cinna, Marius plotted his return from Africa and, in 87 BCE, at the head of his own army he re-entered Rome.
³⁵
He immediately banished Sulla
in absentia
and repealed his regressive laws. Marius died just a few months later – apparently of natural causes, but despised by the people as a tyrant – leaving Cinna ruling Rome alone.
³⁶
Sulla was incensed. Having signed a peace treaty with Mithradates, he reentered Rome in 82 BCE under arms whereupon the Senate granted him the authority of
dictator
– giving him supreme but time-limited power to deal with an emergency – and he promptly purged the city of his enemies by way of proscriptions and instituted far reaching reforms of the constitution.
³⁷
His work done, he surprised everyone when he resigned within a year and retired to write his memoirs.
³⁸
Sulla died from liver failure or a ruptured gastric ulcer aged 60 in 78 BCE and was buried with a lavish state funeral.
³⁹

Into the vacuum left by Sulla stepped two powerful men. Born in 106 BCE, Cn. Pompeius was an unlikely protégé of Sulla.
⁴⁰
Having taken part in the war against Mithradates in 83 BCE, Pompeius went on to help defeat the remaining supporters of Marius in Italy and secured Sicily for Sulla and, with it, the grain supply which fed Rome’s hungry bellies.
⁴¹
Building on his military successes, in 81 BCE he took an army to Africa, where he defeated the last of the Marians, Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, and the Numidian king Iarbas.
⁴²
Recognizing his skillful leadership, his own troops acclaimed him
imperator
, an honorific title meaning ‘commander’.
⁴³
By then he had come to the notice of Sulla who unofficially – and perhaps mockingly – called him
magnus
, ‘the Great’, a nickname which stuck.
⁴⁴
When Pompeius demanded a triumph for his victories, Sulla refused, saying the honour was reserved for military success over non-Romans; but the younger man
took his protest directly to Rome with an army to back his claim. Sulla relented and agreed to allow Pompeius Magnus a victory procession, but only after he had celebrated his own first.
⁴⁵
The event was something of a fiasco, causing Pompeius more embarrassment than adulation.
⁴⁶
His attempts to rise up the political career ladder (
cursus honorum
) were as unsuccessful. His reputation would not be made in the courtroom or Senate House, however, but in the provinces and on the battlefield. When Sulla died, he was campaigning against the renegade proconsul Q. Sertorius who had established an independent state in the Iberian Peninsula.
⁴⁷
He was popular with the local people and attracted the support of Roman colonials and ruled for six years.
⁴⁸
Supplemented by troops who had defected to his cause, Sertorius commanded a sizeable army and was able to resist Pompeius’ attempts to defeat him to the point where he had to appeal to the Senate for reinforcements.
⁴⁹
Sertorius was finally brought down, not by a superior army, but by one of his own officers. Pompeius claimed victory, restored the region to Roman control and administered it with noted efficiency.
⁵⁰

Independently another student of Sulla was advancing his own career. Born around 115 BCE, as a young man M. Licinius Crassus had fled Cinna’s proscriptions and rallied to Sulla’s cause in Africa.
⁵¹
He proved his value by helping to oust Marius from Rome at the final Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BCE.
⁵²
His loyalty was handsomely rewarded during the ensuing confiscations, in particular, of the property of Sulla’s enemies in the city.
⁵³
Over time he added to his portfolio by using his privately-owned fire service to callously browbeat homeowners into either paying for protection or face losing their homes during Rome’s all-too frequent fires.
⁵⁴
Those unable to pay, and subsequently finding their properties destroyed, had little choice but to sell their smouldering ruins to him at deep discounts. He then built squalid tenements on the scorched land and leased them out at exorbitant rents. By these means, he amassed property which Pliny the Elder assessed to be worth 200,000,000
sestertii
.
⁵⁵

In the summer of 73 BCE reports arrived in Rome of a slave revolt led by the gladiators Spartacus the Thracian and Crixus the Gaul.
⁵⁶
At first the Senate underestimated the threat and failed to mobilize a full and overwhelming response. Embarrassingly, the army of gladiators from Capua, and the thousands of slaves they liberated from the surrounding farms of southern Italy, successfully defeated the legions sent to squash them. For almost two years the growing slave army roamed freely across Italy, wandering as far north as the Alps, before turning south for the heal of the peninsula.
⁵⁷
Grabbing the opportunity, Crassus accepted the Senate’s offer of command of an army to lead a counter offensive.
⁵⁸
He had underestimated his challenge, however. The gladiator-trained army proved to be a formidable opponent. In one battle, men from Crassus’ army fled the field and the embarrassed commander was unable to win the day.
⁵⁹
To enforce discipline Crassus angrily resorted to the ancient practice of decimation, in which every tenth man in a unit was chosen by lot for execution.
⁶⁰
For his action Crassus earned a reputation as a fierce and feared disciplinarian.
⁶¹
Meanwhile, Pompeius had been recalled to Italy to support Crassus.
⁶²
He audaciously attempted to belittle Crassus’ glory by claiming in a letter to the Senate that
his
was the decisive role in ending the Gladiator War, while his rival had merely defeated some slaves.
⁶³
Spartacus continued to evade Crassus until his army hunted them down and engaged them at the Battle of the Siler River in the spring of 71 BCE.
⁶⁴
There Spartacus’ rebel band was finally destroyed by the Roman forces. Crassus ordered an estimated 6,000 of the captives crucified along the
Via Appia
.
⁶⁵
In the event, Crassus was not awarded a full triumph, but an
ovatio
,a lower grade of victory celebration.
⁶⁶
From that point on animosity grew between the two men, though they both managed to tolerate each other’s company long enough to serve as consuls for the year 70.
⁶⁷
Just 35 years old and up to that point in his career not even a serving member of the Senate, Pompeius had risen meteorically, and the means by which he had done so set a precedent other men could use to circumvent the age qualifications of the
cursus honorum
.
⁶⁸
He was further rewarded three years years later with the passing of the
Lex Gabinia
, which, to the consternation of some senators, but urged by Crassus, granted him full legal proconsular power (
imperium proconsulare
) to crush the pirates who harassed traders along the coast of any province within fifty miles of the Mediterranean Sea.
⁶⁹
It gave Pompeius unprecedented power over an enormous swath of Roman territory.

Crassus now pursued his political interests in earnest. In 65 BCE he was appointed
censor
– a position responsible for checking the credentials of senators and ensuring that those found guilty of criminal activities were barred from serving in public office – during which he achieved nothing of significance.
⁷⁰
Among Rome’s up and coming generation, he noticed an ambitious and charismatic, but impoverished, young aristocrat and saw potential in him. His name was C. Iulius Caesar. Born in July 101 or 100 BCE, he was a nephew of Marius who had survived Sulla’s proscriptions by going into hiding.
⁷¹
After serving in the army in Asia, Caesar returned to Rome where he climbed the first rungs of his political career, becoming
quaestor
in 75 BCE.
⁷²
In each post he spent lavishly, investing his own money for the upkeep of roads when appointed
curator viarum
, or paying for 320 pairs of gladiators, theatrical performances and public banquets as aedile.
⁷³
These displays brought Caesar notoriety and popularity, though in reality, as Plutarch notes, he was ‘buying things of the highest value at a small price’.
⁷⁴
From Crassus he received his financial backing to seize the post of
Pontifex Maximus
in 63, a priesthood which only expired upon the holder’s death.
⁷⁵

The year 63 – the first of Agrippa’s life – was an extraordinary one. As proconsul of the East, Pompeius defeated and buried Mithradates VI (who had committed suicide), founded the new province of Syria by taking the Seleucid kingdom by force, and helped install Hyrcanus II on the throne of Iudaea by besieging Hierosolyma (modern Jerusalem).
⁷⁶
From his official residence (
Domus Publica
)in the heart of the
Forum Romanum
beside the House of the Vestal Virgins, Caesar exercised the rights and privileges of the ancient religious office, wielding quiet but powerful influence through the political system. In the nearby
Curia Hostilia
where the Senate met, a passionate courtroom lawyer with a gift for public speaking was then serving as consul. Born in 106 BCE in Arpinum, M. Tullius Cicero was a ‘new man’ like Agrippa who spent much of his life struggling to be accepted by the conservative bloc of the Roman upper class (
optimates
).
⁷⁷
Despite being an outsider, he had proved to be a skilled courtroom advocate with an unrivalled talent for oratory.
⁷⁸
He was a passionate champion of the Roman Commonwealth, and had enjoyed the support of Crassus and Pompeius.
⁷⁹
As he would repeatedly claim forever after, he spent his year as consul saving the
Res Publica
: that year L. Sergius Catilina, having failed to win the consulship himself, had attempted to engineer a
coup d’état
and set up a new minority government of wealthy patricians.
⁸⁰
Fatefully Cicero made the decision to have the ringleaders executed, but Catilina managed to escape and raise an army in northern Italy. The decision would come back to haunt him. ‘What a thankless task’, he would tell the Senate on 9 November, ‘no less than administering it, is preserving the
Res Publica
!’
⁸¹

One of the men Cicero accused of participating in the conspiracy was P. Clodius Pulcher. The evidence suggests he actually had nothing to do with the plot but it suited the consul’s ends to implicate the man who had positioned himself as a champion of the urban
plebs
.
⁸²
In the eyes of the
optimates
, like M. Porcius Cato Uticensis who despised corruption, he was seen as a disruptive force in Roman politics; Clodius was one of the
populares
, a loose coalition of senators holding a populist agenda, which included redistributing land and supporting free distributions of grain to the poor. One of Rome’s colourful characters, he had previously served as a
legatus
and took part in the third war against Mithradates under his brother-in-law L. Licinius Lucullus, but, taking umbridge at the lack of respect he felt was shown, he led a revolt.
⁸³
On his return to Rome, he embroiled himself in sexual liaisons with prominent citizens’ wives – including Lucullus’ – and gate-crashed a sacred rite of the
Bona Dea
, the ‘Good Goddess’, in which he dressed as a woman intending to seducing the
Pontifex Maximus
’ wife Pompeia, with whom he was in love.
⁸⁴
He was discovered.
⁸⁵
The ensuing scandal dragged on for several months. Despite the appearance of Cicero as a star witness for the prosecution, with the collusion of Caesar (who claimed to know nothing) and the largesse of Crassus (who bribed the jury) Clodius was acquitted on the criminal charge of
incestus
, ‘sexual immorality’.
⁸⁶