Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (17 page)

Long before the completion of Jupiter’s great temple, however, Sulla had resigned his office. One morning, some time late in 81
BC
, he suddenly appeared in the Forum without his lictors. The man responsible for the deaths of more citizens than any Roman in history had laid aside the sanctions of supreme power, ‘fearing neither the people at home nor the exiles abroad … Such was the extent of his daring and good luck.’
¹⁴
Once again his nerve was justified. Sulla remained a figure of dread. Only on a single occasion did anyone dare to criticise him to his face, a young man who cat-called him in the Forum; then, having failed to get a rise, he jeered him all the way home. Otherwise, the terror of Sulla’s name held good.

The year after he resigned his dictatorship Sulla served as a consul; the year after that he stood down from office altogether. Relieved of formal responsibilities, he returned to the wild living of his youth. It was a lifestyle for which he had never lost his talent. As dictator, he had thrown the largest parties in Rome’s history. Everyone in the city had been invited. Spit-roasts had sizzled in the streets, vintage wines had flowed from public fountains. The citizens had gorged themselves, and then, when no one had been able to eat or drink another thing, whole sides of meat had been slung with delirious wastefulness into the Tiber. As a private citizen, Sulla’s parties were inevitably more intimate affairs. Whole days would be spent in drinking bouts with his old bohemian set. Dizzyingly high though he had risen, Sulla remained as loyal in his friendships as he was implacable in his feuds. Actors, dancers, down-at-heel hacks, all had been tossed crumbs from the estates of the proscribed. Those without talent had been given money never to perform again.
Those who did have talent were cherished, however much they might have passed their prime. Brutal cynic though he was, Sulla would still flatter and cosset a fading drag-queen. ‘Metrobius, the female impersonator, had seen better days, but Sulla never ceased to insist that he was in love with him all the same.’
¹⁵

Certainly, there was none of Marius’ muscle-bound need to prove himself a man: no workouts on the Campus Martius for Sulla. When he retreated to his villa in Campania, he gloried in his retirement. He had restored the Republic, and the fruit of his work was peace. The crisis was over. Who could doubt, seeing Sulla in his Greek tunic, strolling with other tourists through the back streets of Naples, that the good times were back?

Yet in Italy, as in Rome, the good times had been founded on savagery and bloodshed. Not far beyond Sulla’s estate rose the hills of Samnium, harrowed in a policy of deliberate extirpation. All around it, dotted across the Plain of Campania, stood cities still scarred by their resistance to Sulla. Even Naples had been stormed by his legions. Nola too, eventually, had fallen. Besieged for almost a decade, the rebel stronghold had held out until 80
BC
, steeled by the same spectacle of atrocities that had persuaded other towns to incinerate themselves rather than surrender. To punish Nola, and to provide a permanent occupying force, Sulla had planted a colony of his veterans in the city, one of numerous similar settlements imposed all over Campania and Samnium. Triumphant even in his enemies’ most obdurate stronghold, Sulla had celebrated by giving Nola a new and humiliating name – Colonia Felix. Only one other act of appropriation can have given him more pleasure. Just down the coast from his own estate stood Marius’ celebrated villa, raised on its promontory like a military camp, a shrine to the old soldier’s glory and masculine pride. Sulla sold it cheap to his daughter, Cornelia. He had always believed in rubbing salt into open wounds.

This streak of cruelty would never be forgotten, nor forgiven. Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies, but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: ‘Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?’
¹⁶

The generation that succeeded him would have to give their own answer to that question. In doing so they would serve to define how Sulla himself was best to be judged: had he been the saviour or destroyer of the constitution? Terrible though he had proved himself to be, the dictator had also laboured hard to restore the Republic, to ensure that he would have no successor. Historians of future generations, inured to perpetual autocracy, found fantastical the idea that anyone should voluntarily have laid down supreme power. Yet Sulla had done it. No wonder that his own contemporaries found him such a baffling and contradictory figure. When he died – most probably of liver failure – no one could even agree how to dispose of his body. One consul wanted to award him a state funeral, the other to deprive him of funereal honours altogether. Fittingly, it was the threat of violence that served to resolve the debate. A huge escort of veterans assembled to bring their dead general from Campania, and the people of Rome found themselves ‘as terrified of Sulla’s army and his corpse as if he were still alive’.
¹⁷
No sooner had the body been laid on a huge pyre in the Campus Martius than a strong wind came gusting across the plain, whipping up the flames. And no sooner had the corpse been consumed than it started to rain.

Sulla stayed lucky to the very end.

The life of a young Roman nobleman was filled with opportunity and risk. Civil war heightened the extremes of both. Under Sulla, a young man might be plunged straight into the deep end of adult life. Some profited spectacularly. Most dazzling of all was the example of Pompey, who continued to pose and preen perfectly unruffled by Sulla’s legislation against boy-wonders. Even as the dictator moved to forbid anyone under the age of thirty from holding political office, his fresh-faced lieutenant was thrashing an army of Marian die-hards in Africa, and being hailed by his troops as ‘The Great’. Pompey was exceptional, however, and gloried in the fact. Others of his generation were less fortunate. Sulla’s secret police respected neither youth nor pedigree. So it was, for instance, that because Marius had married into the Julians, the heir of that ancient, patrician family found himself on the run. Only nineteen, a young man whose family connections should have ensured him seamless advancement, he had to hide out in mountain haylofts and offer frantic bribes to bounty-hunters. It was an experience he would never forget. In future years he would prove
himself unusually determined to master the vagaries of Fortune. No less than Pompey, the young Julius Caesar emerged from the years of Sulla’s domination hardened before his time.

In this both men were only proving themselves true to their upbringings. Hardness was a Roman ideal. The steel required to hunt out glory or endure disaster was the defining mark of a citizen. It was instilled in him from the moment of his birth. The primary response of Roman parents to their babies appears to have been less tenderness than shock that anything could be quite so soft and helpless. ‘An infant, like a sailor hurled ashore by savage waves, lies naked on the ground, unable to speak a word, utterly dependent on other people for his survival.’
¹
To the Romans, such a condition verged on the scandalous. Children were certainly too weak to be idealised, and the highest praise a child could be given was to be compared to an adult. The result is, to modern eyes at least, a curious and frustrating gap in ancient biographies. Never do the great figures of the Republic appear chillier or more remote from us than when their earliest years are being described. We are offered portraits of them as prodigies of physical toughness or learning – stiff, priggish, implausible. Anecdotes that portray them as children rather than as mini-adults are few and far between. The greater the figure, the less adequate the portrait of his childhood is likely to appear. The early years of a man such as Caesar are effectively a blank. Any attempt to recreate them must depend, even more than is usually the case in ancient history, on supposition and generalisation. Yet the attempt is still worthwhile. The Romans were as aware as any psychologist that ‘Nature displays her blueprints most clearly in a man’s earliest years.’
²
Childhood was where the future citizen was made.

What, then, can we say with any certainty about the infant who would one day destroy the Republic? Gaius Julius Caesar was born on 13 July 100
BC
, six years after Pompey, fifteen after Crassus. Ritual
would have surrounded him from his earliest moments. A Roman did not become a citizen by right of birth. It was within the power of every father to reject a newborn child, to order unwanted sons, and especially daughters, to be exposed. Before the infant Caesar was breastfed, his father would first have had to hold him aloft, signalling that the boy had been accepted as his own, and was therefore a Roman. Nine days later he would have been named. Evil spirits would have been swept out of the house with a broom. The boy’s future would have been read in the behaviour of passing birds. A golden good-luck charm, the
bulla
, would have been placed around the baby Gaius’ neck, to stay there until he came of age and became a full citizen.

No delay would have been permitted in preparing for that moment. The Romans lacked a specific word for ‘baby’, reflecting their assumption that a child was never too young to be toughened up. Newborns were swaddled tightly to mould them into the form of adults, their features were kneaded and pummelled, and boys would have their foreskins yanked to make them stretch. Old-fashioned Republican morality and new-fangled Greek medicine united to prescribe a savage regime of dieting and cold baths. The result of this harsh upbringing was to contribute further to an already devastating infant mortality rate. It has been estimated that only two out of three children survived their first year, and that under 50 per cent went on to reach puberty. The deaths of children were constant factors of family life. Parents were encouraged to respond to such losses with flinty calm. The younger the child, the less emotion would be shown, so that it was a commonplace to argue that ‘if an infant dies in its cradle, then its death ought not even be mourned’.
³
Yet reserve did not necessarily spell indifference. There is plenty of evidence from tombstones, poetry and private correspondence to suggest the depth of love that Roman parents could feel. The rigours imposed on a child were not the result of wilful
cruelty. Far from it: the sterner the parents, the more loving they were assumed to be.

Caesar’s upbringing was famously strict, and his mother, Aurelia, was accordingly remembered by subsequent generations of Romans as a model parent; so model, in fact, that it was said she had breastfed her children. This, notoriously, was something that upper-class women rarely chose to do, despite it being their civic duty, since, as everyone knew, milk was imbued with the character of the woman who supplied it. How could a slave’s milk ever compare with that of a freeborn Roman woman? Irresponsible aristocrats who handed their babies over to wet-nurses were clearly compromising their children’s future. Yet still they did it. It was a clear and shocking symptom of the degeneracy of the times. Aurelia’s boast that she had devoted herself to child-rearing had a proudly anachronistic ring.

And paragon of Republican motherhood that she was, no sooner had she weaned her children than she set about the business of their education. Gaius was not the exclusive focus of Aurelia’s attentions. As well as her son, she had two daughters, Julia Major and Julia Minor. The Romans believed that girls had to be moulded just as much as boys. Physical as well as intellectual exercises were prescribed for both. A boy trained his body for warfare, a girl for childbirth, but both were pushed to the point of exhaustion. To the Romans, self-knowledge came from appreciating the limits of one’s endurance. It was only by testing what these might be that a child could be prepared for adult life.

No wonder that Roman children appear to have had little time for play. Far fewer toys have been found dating from the Republic than from the period that followed its collapse, when the pressure to raise good citizens had begun to decline. Even so, children were children: ‘As they grow older, not even the threat of punishment can keep them from playing games with all the energy they have.’
⁴
Girls certainly had their dolls, since it was the custom to dedicate these to Venus as part of the rituals of marriage. Boys, meanwhile, played obsessively with spinning tops. Dice appear to have been a universal mania. At wedding parties the groom would be expected to toss children coins or nuts that could then be played for as stakes. Caesar would one day talk of rolling a die when he faced the gravest crisis of his life, and his taste for the metaphor must surely have derived from his childhood. Even throwing dice, however, he would still have been supervised by the implacable Aurelia, who was as concerned to ‘regulate his behaviour when he was playing games as when he was hard at his studies’.
⁵
Perhaps it was from his mother, then, that Caesar first learned to practise one of his greatest skills, the art of distinguishing an acceptable risk from a heedless gamble.

If so, then it would only serve to emphasise a glaring omission in accounts of Caesar’s childhood – mention of his father’s influence. By supervising her son’s upbringing so closely, Aurelia, model parent though she was, ran the risk of stepping on her husband’s toes. The freedoms granted to Roman women may have been exceptional by the standards of the age, but the authority of a Roman father was even more so. His powers of life and death did not end with the acceptance of a child into his household. His daughters, even once they had been married off, might well remain his wards, while his sons, no matter how old they grew, no matter how many magistracies they might win, never ceased to be his dependants. There was no father quite so patriarchal as a Roman one. As was invariably the case with the Republic, however, rights brought obligations. At the census every head of a household would be asked whether he had married for the purpose of having children. It was a citizen’s patriotic duty to contribute to his city’s future manpower. More immediate, however, and no doubt far more keenly felt, was a father’s duty to the prestige of his family.
Status in the Republic was not inherited. Instead, it had to be re-earned over each successive generation. The son who failed to equal the rank and achievements of his ancestors, the daughter who neglected to influence her husband in the interests of her father or her brothers – both brought public shame on their family. It was the responsibility of the
pater familias
to ensure that such a calamity never occurred. As a result, child-rearing, like virtually every other aspect of life in the Republic, reflected the inveterate Roman love of competition. To raise heirs successfully, to instil in them due pride in their blood-line and a hankering after glory, these were achievements worthy of a man.