Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (16 page)

Further lists followed. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of names appeared. In a grotesque parody of the census, the names of men without Marian sympathies, but whose wealth and status made them tempting targets, began to be sneaked in. Ghouls who gathered in the Forum to inspect the lists might easily find their own names featured. Villas, pleasure gardens, swimming pools, all were now potential death warrants. Everywhere, bounty-hunters tracked down their prey. The severed heads of victims would be brought back to Rome, and Sulla, once he had inspected them and released the promised fee, might keep particularly prized specimens as trophies in his house.

Such a grisly system of accounting was easy to abuse. No one exploited it more profitably than Crassus, who had the nose for gain of a man who had suffered from confiscations himself. As the general who had saved Sulla at the Colline Gate, he was in a privileged position to throw his weight about. Gifts were duly extorted, estates snapped up cheap. At length, however, when Crassus added the name of an innocent millionaire just a little too flagrantly on to a proscription list, Sulla lost patience. In the resulting scandal relations between the two men broke down irreparably, and Sulla withdrew his favour from his former lieutenant. Crassus was already so rich that he could afford not to care.

As for Sulla, ever the master strategist, he picked quarrels only as a matter of policy. By slapping down his own ally so publicly, he could represent himself as the selfless cleanser of the Republic, washing it in blood without thought of personal gain. For all the ostentation of his shock at Crassus’ avarice, however, there were few who were convinced by it. Sulla’s policy had always been to cut down his enemies and build up his friends. Crassus was far too powerful and ambitious to serve as anyone’s parasite, but those whom Sulla did not regard as threats were duly rewarded. Often, he would personally sell on properties at ludicrously knock-down prices. His policy was a deliberate one of ruining his opponents by enriching
his supporters. ‘Not until Sulla had glutted all his followers with wealth did the slaughter at last come to an end.’
¹⁰

Generous though he was, however, the man who profited most from the proscriptions was Sulla himself. The pauper who had once been forced to doss in squalid flop-houses was now richer than any Roman in history. It so happened that during the course of the proscriptions a senator who had been condemned to death was found hiding in the house of one of his former slaves. The freedman was duly brought before Sulla to be condemned. The two men recognised each other at once. Both, long before, had shared lodgings in the same apartment block, and the freedman, even as he was hauled away to his execution, yelled at Sulla that there had once been little difference between them. He meant it as a taunt, a scream of defiance, but Sulla is unlikely to have interpreted it as such. Nothing could have better illustrated the distance he had travelled. Nothing could have better demonstrated that he was ‘
Felix
’ indeed.

Sulla aimed to build as well as destroy. Even as the streets of Rome ran red he talked loudly of restoring the Republic to full health. As ever with him, opportunism was the obverse of an icy conviction. The cycle of wars and revolutions through which he had hacked his way so savagely had done nothing to diminish his deeply held conservatism. Sulla had the true patrician’s contempt for innovation. Far from wishing to impose some radical new model of autocracy on his fellow citizens, he looked to the past for solutions to the crisis facing Rome.

Most urgently of all, he faced the need to regularise his own position. Even with his enemies proscribed, Sulla still refused to
submit himself to the judgement of the voters. Fortunately, a precedent for this lay conveniently close to hand. The Republic’s ancient history did indeed provide examples of citizens who had wielded absolute power without being elected. In moments of particular crisis the authority of the consuls had sometimes been suspended and a single magistrate nominated to take control of the state. Such an office fitted Sulla’s requirements perfectly. The fact that it was a constitutional fossil worried him not in the slightest. By dropping heavy and menacing hints, he persuaded the Senate to dust down the antiquated office, and appoint him to it. The result was not only to legalise his supremacy, but to give it the patina of tradition. After all, how could the Romans consider themselves threatened by a magistracy as authentically Republican as the dictatorship?

In fact, though, it had always been regarded with suspicion. Unlike the consulship, split as it was between two citizens of equal rank, the unified powers of the dictatorship were inherently offensive to Republican ideals. This was why the office had fallen into abeyance. Even back in the dark days of the war against Hannibal, citizens had been appointed to it only for very short, fixed periods. Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous. Sulla, however, who enjoyed alcohol and power equally, was proud of his head for both. He refused to accept a limit on his term of office. Instead, he was to remain dictator until the constitution had been ‘revised’.
¹¹
What this might mean he would judge for himself.

A consul had twelve lictors. Sulla had twenty-four. Each one bore on his shoulders not only the
fasces
, but also, bundled up with the scourging rods and symbolising a dictator’s powers of life and death, an axe. Nothing could better have indicated the disproportion in status now existing between Sulla and his fellow magistrates. He was quick to ram home the message. No sooner had he been appointed
dictator than he ordered consular elections to be held. Both the candidates were selected by himself. When one of his own generals, the war hero who had captured Praeneste, no less, attempted to stand, Sulla warned him to back off, and then, when he refused, had him murdered publicly in the Forum. More than anyone, Sulla had reason to appreciate just how dangerous war heroes might be.

It was an irony that shadowed the entire programme of his reforms. Sulla’s task as dictator was to ensure that in the future no one would ever again do as he had done and lead an army on Rome. Yet it is doubtful whether Sulla himself would have regarded this as a paradox. If, as his propaganda relentlessly insisted, he was guiltless of provoking civil war, then the fault had to lie elsewhere. And if, as his propaganda also insisted, ambition had tempted Marius and Sulpicius into endangering the Republic, then it was the corruption of the Republic’s own institutions that had permitted them to thrive. Sulla was too much of a Roman to imagine that a desire to be the best might ever in itself be a crime. He certainly had no intention of suppressing his countrymen’s inveterate thirsting after glory. Instead, he aimed to channel it, so that once again, rather than tearing the state to shreds, it might serve the greater glory of Rome.

The complexities, the ambivalences and the paradoxes of the constitution all infuriated the new dictator. Sulla interpreted them as loopholes, and worked hard to close them. No openings were to be left that a future Marius might exploit. Instead, ambition was to be strictly regulated. Each magistracy was to have an age threshold. Sulla, who had spent his own twenties chasing after whores, must have relished the chance to discriminate against youthful over-achievers.

Under his legislation, no one under the age of thirty would be permitted to seek election to even the most junior magistracy. This, the quaestorship, entitled a successful candidate to serve for a year as an assistant to one of the more senior magistrates, and to learn
from the example of the older man. Some quaestors might even be given independent responsibilities, managing the Republic’s finances, habituating themselves to the disciplines and duties of power. This was important training, for the citizen who had served as quaestor would be entitled, once he had reached his thirty-ninth birthday, to aim for a further, even more prestigious honour: the praetorship. If elected to this office, he would now, for a year, be junior in rank only to the consuls themselves. A praetor had awesome responsibilities and privileges: charged as he was with the weighty task of administering the Republic’s laws, he also had the right to convene a session of the Senate, and preside over its debates. Under Sulla’s new scheme of things, however, the real attraction of the praetorship was that it now served as an obligatory step on the ladder that led, rung after ordered rung, towards the consulship itself. This remained the top, the glittering prize. As always, only a few would ever win it, but the goal of Sulla’s reforms was to ensure that, in the future, the victors would prove worthy of their rank. There were to be no more scandals like the career of the younger Marius. From quaestorship to praetorship to consulship, only a single path to power, and no short cuts.

The deliberate effect of this legislation was to place a premium on middle age. In this it accorded with fundamental Roman instincts. Statesmen were expected to be middle aged. Greek rulers may have portrayed themselves as preternaturally young, but the portraiture of the Republic suggests a positive relish for wrinkles, thinning hair and sagging jowls. It was no coincidence that the traditional ruling body of Rome, the Senate, derived its name from ‘
senex
’ – ‘old man’ – nor that senators liked to dignify themselves with the title of ‘Fathers’. The ideal of an assembly rich in experience and wisdom, acting as a brake on such irresponsible elements as the young or indigent poor, was one dear to every conservative’s heart. In the mythology of the Republic it was the Senate that had
guided Rome to greatness, prevailing over Hannibal, breaking kings, conquering the world. Sulla, despite having trampled over the Senate at every opportunity, made the restoration of its authority the major goal of his career.

Repair work was urgently required. Civil war and proscriptions had left the august body in a parlous state. Sulla, having played a major part in the reduction of its numbers from three hundred to barely one hundred, promoted newcomers with such assiduity that by the time he had finished the Senate was larger than at any time in its history. Equestrians from all walks of life – businessmen, Italians, plunder-rich officers – were hurriedly crammed into the Senate House. Simultaneously, the opportunities for self-advancement within the Senate were also broadened. Under Sulla’s reforms, the number of praetorships on offer in any one year was increased from six to eight, and of quaestorships from eight to twenty – a conscious attempt to ensure that the upper reaches of power would be regularly infused with fresh blood. The established nobility, not surprisingly, were appalled by such measures. Roman snobbery, however, was skilled at keeping newcomers in their place. Senators, like everyone else in the Republic, were bound by ironclad rules of hierarchy. Rank structured the order in which they were called upon to speak, and junior senators rarely had the chance to speak at all. Even men who had once been outspoken critics of the Senate were no sooner promoted to the body than they found themselves silenced. Sulla, not known for his generosity towards enemies, appears to have decided that there were certain opponents it was wisest to co-opt.

Some, of course, still remained beyond the pale. The aspirations of the mob Sulla regarded with contempt. Those who represented them he regarded with naked loathing. Even as he built up the power of the Senate, Sulla emasculated the tribunate with the vindictiveness that characterised all his vendettas. He never forgot that
Sulpicius had been a tribune. Each snipping away of the tribunate’s powers was a delicate act of personal revenge. To ensure that tribunes could never again propose bills attacking a consul, as Sulpicius had done, Sulla barred them from proposing bills altogether. To prevent the tribunate from attracting ambitious trouble-makers in the future, he throttled it of all potential to advance a career. With carefully nuanced malice, Sulla banned anyone who had held the office from seeking further magistracies. Quaestors and praetors might dream of the consulship, but not tribunes, not any more. Their office was to be a rung on a ladder leading nowhere. Revenge, as ever with Sulla, was sweet.

One of the ancient pillars of the constitution now lay in rubble. Even Sulla’s conservative supporters in the Senate appear to have been shocked.
¹²
No one had ever before attempted such a work of demolition. The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic. It spread everywhere that Sulla cared to look. It could be seen in the very appearance of Rome herself. Sulla, whose invariable response to provocation was to launch a single, rapid killer-blow against it, quickly proved himself as impatient with the urban fabric as he had been with the Marians or the tribunate. Frustrated by the city’s congestion, he simply pushed back the
pomerium
, the first man to do so in the whole of Roman history. Just as coolly, he levelled the cramped but venerable Senate House, and rebuilt it to suit the proportions of his own new, inflated Senate. Not that the senators themselves displayed much gratitude. Decades later they were still mourning the original building, sanctified as it had been by the Republic’s historic heroes, and complaining that ‘its enlargement appeared to have shrunk it’.
¹³
Sulla could afford to dismiss all such moaning with a contemptuous shrug. Only on the Capitol was he inhibited by the sanctions of custom. The temple of Jupiter might have been burned to the ground, but its outline still remained. As a
new temple rose from the ashes, the gigantic columns that Sulla had conveniently plundered from Athens gleamed from within the confines of the original, sacrosanct structure. Monumentalism squatted awkwardly on archaic foundations. Sulla’s dictatorship could hardly have raised a more fitting memorial to itself.