Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (13 page)

So it was that, even after the shocks of 88, life went on. The new year of 87 dawned with an appearance of normality. Two consuls, elected by the Roman people, sat in their chairs of state. The Senate met to advise them. The streets were empty of soldiers. Meanwhile, the man who had dared to march on Rome was disembarking in Greece. His ferocious talents, no longer turned against his own countrymen, could at last be deployed in a fitting manner. There was a war, sternest of all the Romans’ traditions, to be won; enemies of the Republic to overthrow and chastise.

Sulla was marching east.

Six years earlier, in 93
BC
, a Roman commissioner had paused in Athens on his way to Asia. Gellius Publicola was a man who combined a taste for Greek culture with the sensibility of a joker. Wishing to meet the philosophers for which Athens was still celebrated, he had summoned the various representatives of the squabbling philosophical schools and urged them, with a perfectly straight face, to resolve their differences. If this proved beyond their abilities, he added, then he was very graciously prepared to step in and settle their controversies for them. Forty years later, Gellius’ proposal to the Athenian philosophers would still be remembered by his friends as a prize example of wit. ‘How everyone roared!’
⁶

Quite when the philosophers realised that Gellius was joking we are not told. Nor whether they found the joke quite so rib-tickling as Gellius himself seems to have done. One suspects that they did
not. Philosophy was still a serious business in Athens. The very idea of being lectured by a bumptious Roman prankster must surely have struck the heirs of Socrates as a humiliating indignity. All the same, they no doubt laughed politely, if hollowly: Roman offers to settle squabbles had a certain ominous resonance in Greece.

And anyway, in Athens servility and arrogance had long been sides of the same coin. More than anywhere else in Greece, the sanctity of history clung to the city. The Athenians never forgot – nor let anyone else forget – that it was they who had saved Greece at the Battle of Marathon, and had once been the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean. Resplendent still upon the Acropolis, the Parthenon stood as a permanent memorial to the years of Athenian supremacy. All gone, though; long gone. In the list of the Seven Wonders of the World, composed in the century after Alexander’s death, the Parthenon was conspicuous by its absence. It was too small, too out-of-date, reflecting the presumptions of an age in which empires as well as monuments had grown gigantic. Compared to the super-state of Rome, Athens was a provincial backwater. Her memories of empire were nostalgia, nothing more. Any ideas above their station, any hints that the Athenians still imagined themselves a great power, were regarded by the Romans with hilarity. During the Republic’s campaigns against Macedon Athens had presumed to give her support, declaring war with a masterpiece of rhetorical invective. The Romans were not impressed. ‘This was the Athenians’ war against the King of Macedon, a war of words,’ they sniffed. ‘Words are the only weapon that the Athenians have left.’
⁷

Gellius’ joke was cruel because it suggested that even this last weapon might be taken away from them. As, in truth, it already had been. Whether they cared to admit it or not, philosophers, like every other legacy of the Athenian golden age, had become mere adjuncts to the service industry. Those who did particularly well
out of Roman patronage had long since learned to cut the cloth of their speculations accordingly. Typical was the age’s most celebrated polymath, Posidonius. Although he had studied in Athens, Posidonius was widely travelled, and rationalised what he observed in Rome’s provinces – rather optimistically – as a commonwealth of man. He was a close associate of Rutilius Rufus, that upright defender of his province’s interests, and evidently believed that his friend was a truer face of Rome than the
publicani
who had destroyed him. In the new order that the Republic was bringing into the world, Posidonius somehow managed to catch a reflection of the order of the universe. He argued that it was the moral duty of Rome’s subjects to accept such a dispensation. Differences of culture and geography would soon dissolve. History was coming to an end.

Posidonius may have been expressing himself in high-flown terms, but he was only putting a gloss on what was evident enough anyway. The coming of Rome had indeed shrunk the world. It did not take a philosopher to recognise this – or to turn it to profit. The Athenian ruling classes may privately have regarded their Roman masters as bullying philistines, but they knew better than to voice such an opinion publicly. While the Romans had few compunctions about beggaring their defeated enemies, they had always been careful to reward their friends, and Athens had benefited accordingly. The juiciest prize of all had come in 165, following the final war against Macedon, during which the island republic of Rhodes had been less than full-blooded in her backing for Rome. This had been duly noted by the Senate. Rhodes had long been the major trading entrepôt in the eastern Mediterranean, and in punishing her the Romans had demonstrated that they could toy with economies to the same devastating effect that they fought on the battlefield. A toll-free harbour had been opened on the island of Delos, and presented to Athens. Rhodes had consequently seen her revenues collapse; Athens had grown rich. By the start of the first
century, so prosperous had the Athenians become that their currency, with Roman encouragement, had established itself as legal tender throughout the Greek world. Parallel measures synchronised the different systems of weights used in Italy and Athens. It was not only Rome that benefited from the resulting trade boom. Ships crammed with Italian commodities began to throng the harbours of Athens and Delos. The Athenian upper classes, their eyes now firmly fixed on the world beyond their city, concentrated on the only measure of achievement left to them – that of becoming millionaires.

This was not an option open to every Athenian, of course. In an economy run by and for the super-rich the wealthier a minority of citizens became, the more the resentments of the majority seethed. This was true of every society in the ancient world, but in Athens – the birthplace of democracy – perhaps uniquely so. Among the Athenian poor, dreams of independence were indissolubly linked to memories of the time when the power of the people had been more than just a slogan. Nothing, of course, could have been more designed to give big business the jitters. As it progressively tightened its grip on government, the institutions that had once maintained Athenian democracy were allowed to wither. However, they were not abolished altogether because, apart from anything else, they were good for the tourist trade. Visiting Romans enjoyed the quaint spectacle of democracy in action. Sometimes Athens offered the pleasures less of a museum than of a zoo.

Then suddenly, in 88
BC
, everything was turned upside down. While the Athenian business elite watched in horror as Mithridates’ armies camped in triumph on the opposite shores of the Aegean, their impoverished countrymen crowed in delight. The old desperate longing for freedom, so long repressed, convulsed the city. An embassy was sent to Mithridates, who welcomed it with open arms. An agreement was speedily reached: in return for providing
him with a harbour, Athens would have her democracy restored. The pro-Roman business classes, realising which way the wind was blowing, began to flee the city. Democracy was officially re-established, amid wild scenes of rejoicing, and even wilder scenes of slaughter. Out of the exploding class war a new government emerged, pledged to defending the city’s ancient order and traditions. Athens being Athens, the revolution was led by a philosopher, one Aristion, an old sparring partner of Posidonius who did not share his rival’s positive perspective on Rome. With Italy riven by war, however, and an alliance with the all-conquering Mithridates in the bag, Aristion did not expect too much trouble from the Romans. To the ecstatic Athenians, independence and democracy alike appeared secured. Then, in the spring of 87, Sulla landed in Greece.

He headed directly for Athens. Almost before they knew what had hit them, the Athenians found themselves with five vengeful legions commanded by Rome’s most ruthless general camped outside their walls. Confronted by this nightmare, Aristion’s only tactic was to compose rude songs about Sulla’s face, comparing it with a mulberry topped with oatmeal. These would be chanted from the city walls while Aristion himself yelled obscene witticisms about Sulla and his wife, complete with extravagant hand gestures. Proof, as Posidonius commented acidly, ‘that swords should never be placed in the hands of children’.
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Sulla, whose enjoyment of comedians had its limits, responded to Aristion with a few pointed insults of his own. He ordered the groves where Plato and Aristotle had taught to be chopped down and used to build siege engines. When an Athenian peace delegation did what Athenian peace delegations had always done and began to discourse windily on the glories of its city’s past, Sulla silenced the talk with a gesture of his hand. ‘Rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history.’
⁹
With this dismissal, he sent the delegates back to
their city to eat boiled shoe leather, and starve. Athens’ cultural capital had reached the limits of its overdraft.

When at length the city was stormed, and Sulla gave his troops licence to plunder and kill, many of the victims were suicides. They knew all too well what the fate of Corinth had been, and they dreaded the annihilation of their city. The destruction was certainly terrible: the port was obliterated and the Acropolis plundered; everyone who had served in the democratic government was executed; their supporters were stripped of the vote. The city itself, however, was not burned to the ground. Sulla, who had expressed such contempt for history, announced with a grand rhetorical flourish that he spared the living out of respect for the dead. Even as he spoke blood was spilling outwards from the city through the suburbs.

The wreckage was inherited by a government of the businessmen who had fled to Sulla when the trouble first began. They crawled back into a city from which every figleaf of independence and prosperity had been torn. Roman rule was soon confirmed beyond all doubt when Sulla, marching north from Athens, met and smashed two armies sent to Greece by Mithridates. Soon afterwards Sulla held a summit with Mithridates himself. Both men had good reason to come to an agreement. Mithridates, knowing that the game was over, was desperate to keep hold of his kingdom. Sulla, nervous of his enemies back in Italy, was eager to head home. In return for accepting controls on his offensive capability and the surrender of all the territory he had conquered, the murderer of eighty thousand Italians was rewarded by Sulla with a peck on his cheek. No one had ever emerged so unscathed from a war with the Republic before. Beaten he may have been, but Mithridates still sat on the throne of Pontus. The time would come when Rome would regret that he had not been finished off for good.

As it was, the immediate objects of Sulla’s vengeance were the wretched Greeks. In the province of Asia, Roman rule was briskly
reimposed. Sulla, posing as the avenger of his murdered countrymen, despite the peck he had given Mithridates, applied the screws with relish. Not only were cities charged five years’ back-tax, but they were expected to pay the full costs of the war, and billet the garrisons sent to oppress them. Sulla, who liked to pretend that his terms had been generous, creamed off the tribute, and in 84 headed back to Greece. Now that Athens was no longer in arms against him he could display his respect for her cultural legacy in the traditional manner of victorious Roman generals – by pilfering it. The columns of the temple of Zeus were pulled down ready for transport to Rome. Athletes were rounded up, showpieces for Sulla’s triumph, leaving the Olympic Games so denuded of its stars that only the sprint could be staged. Most gratifying of all to Sulla’s sense of humour was the wholesale looting of Athenian libraries, which were stripped of their holdings. Henceforward, if anyone wanted to study Aristotle, they would have to do so in Rome. Sulla’s revenge on Athenian philosophy was sweet.

Even so, his capacity for vengeance had not yet been tested to the limits. As he pointed out proudly in a letter to the Senate, in barely three years he had won back all the territory annexed by Mithridates. Greece and Asia once again acknowledged the sway of Rome. Or so it suited Sulla to pretend. In fact, he no longer represented the Republic. The government he had established back in Rome had collapsed. Sulla himself had been condemned to death
in absentia
, his property razed, his family forced to flee. There was no one in the shattered East who could have doubted what Sulla’s response to these insults would be. Now that Greece had been tamed, he was ready to head back home. Still trusting in his luck and the protection of Venus, Sulla prepared to embark his troops and turn his vengeance back on his native city.

Once again, Rome would have to wait his arrival, and shudder.

On 6 July 83
BC
the largest and holiest building in Rome was struck by lightning. The ancient temple of Jupiter loomed on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. Here, beneath a ceiling sheathed in gold, amid trophies of statues and shields, the guardian of Rome had his shrine. Back in the distant days of the kings, excavators digging the temple’s foundations had found a human head. Augurers, summoned to interpret this wonder, had explained that it foretold Rome’s future as the head of the world. Who could doubt, then, that it was Jupiter who had guided the Republic to its greatness? No wonder that the Senate should choose to hold its first meeting every year in the sanctum of the god. This was where Roman power was most touched by the divine.