Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (19 page)

What we describe as a greasy pole the Romans called the ‘
Cursus’.
This was a word with several shades of meaning. At its most basic level it could be used of any journey, particularly an urgent one. Among sporting circles, however, it had a more specific connotation: not only a racetrack, but the name given to the chariot races themselves, the most popular event held in the Circus Maximus, that great sounding board of public opinion. To call a nobleman a charioteer was an insult – little short of describing him as a gladiator or a bandit – yet there, embedded in the language of the racing fan, the comparison persisted, a hint of what was perhaps an unpalatable truth. In the Republic sport was political and politics was a sport. Just as the skilled charioteer had to round the
metae
, the
turning posts, lap after lap, knowing that a single error – a clipping of a
meta
with his wheel-hub, or an attempt to round it too fast – might send his vehicle careering out of control, so the ambitious nobleman had to risk his reputation in election after election. To the cheers and boos of spectators, charioteer and nobleman alike would make their drive for glory, knowing that the risk of failure was precisely what gave value to success. Then, once it was over, the finishing line breasted, or the consulship won, new contestants would step forward and the race would start again.

‘The track which leads to fame is open to many.’
¹¹
Such was the consolatory maxim – but it was not strictly true. Because the track in the Circus was narrow, only four chariots could compete on it at a time. In elections, too, there was a similarly restricted field. Glory was not on infinite supply. Only a limited number of magistracies could be held each year. Sulla, by increasing the number of annual praetorships from six to eight, had attempted to broaden the opportunities on offer. But because he had simultaneously neutralised the tribunate and doubled the size of the Senate, his legacy was in fact one of increased competition. ‘The clash of wits, the fight for pre-eminence, the toiling day and night without break to reach the summit of wealth and power’
¹²
– this was the spectacle that the
Cursus
provided. Over the succeeding decades it would become ever more gruelling, carnivorous and frantic.

As they had always done, established families dominated the competition. The pressure that afflicted Caesar, of belonging to a family with few consulships to its name, was no more burdensome than the pressure on a consul’s son. The greater the ancient triumphs of a house, the more horrific was the idea that these might end up squandered. To an outsider, it might appear as though all a nobleman had to do was stay in his bed, ‘and electoral honours would be given to him on a plate’
¹³
– but nothing in Rome was ever given to anyone in that way. Nobility was perpetuated not by blood
but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. Fail to gain a senior magistracy or – worse – lose membership of the Senate altogether and a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only ‘to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all’.
¹⁴
No wonder, then, that the great houses so resented intruders into the Senate. The election of
arrivistes
to the quaestorship, first and most junior of the stages on the
Cursus
, they might just about tolerate, but access to the more senior magistracies – the praetorship and the consulship – was ferociously guarded. This made the task of an ambitious parvenu – a ‘new man’, as the Romans called him – all the more arduous. Yet it was never impossible. As old families crashed out of the race, so new ones might find themselves in pole position to overtake. The electorate was capricious. Sometimes, just sometimes, talent might be preferred to a celebrated name. After all, as new men occasionally dared to point out, if magistracies were hereditary, then what would be the point in holding elections at all?
¹⁵

Marius, of course, provided the great example of a commoner made good. If it were sufficiently dashing, a military career might well provide a new man with both glory and loot. All the same, it was hard for anyone without contacts to win a command. Rome had no military academy. Staff officers were generally young aristocrats adept at pulling strings. Caesar would never have had the opportunity to win his civic crown had he not been a patrician. Even once it had been obtained, a military posting could bring its own problems. Lengthy campaigns, of the kind that might win a new man spectacular glory, would also keep him away from Rome. No one on the make could afford long-term leave of absence. Ambitious novices in the political game would generally serve their time with the legions, and maybe even win some honourable scars,
but few made their names that way. That was usually left to established members of the nobility. Instead, for the new man, the likeliest career path to triumph in the
Cursus
, to the ultimate glory of the consulship and to seeing himself and his descendants join the ranks of the elite, was the law.

In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans no end to point out how ‘incredibly muddled – almost verging on the ridiculous – other legal systems are compared to our own!’
¹⁶
In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squirrelling away his portable wealth in time. His political career, however, would be over. Not only were criminals stripped of their citizenship, but they could be killed with impunity if they ever set foot back in Italy. Every Roman who entered the
Cursus
had to be aware that this might be his fate. Only if he won a magistracy would he be immune from the prosecutions of his rivals, and even then only for the period of his office. The moment it ended his enemies could pounce. Bribery, intimidation,
the shameless pulling of strings – anything would be attempted to avoid a prosecution. If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.

To the Romans, with their inveterate addiction to passionate and sensational rivalries, this made the law a thrilling spectator sport. Courts were open to the general public. Two permanent tribunals stood in the Forum, and other temporary platforms might be thrown up as circumstance required. As a result, the discerning enthusiast always had a wide choice of trials from which to choose. Orators could gauge their standing by their audience share. This only encouraged the histrionics that were anyway part and parcel of a Roman trial. Close attention to the minutiae of statutes was regarded as the pettifogging strategy of a second-class mind, since everyone knew that only ‘those who fail to make the grade as an orator resort to the study of the law’.
¹⁷
Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke.
¹⁸
Conversely, he felt not the slightest embarrassment at displays of wild emotion. Defendants would be told to wear mourning and look as haggard as they could. Relatives would periodically burst into tears. Marius, we are told, wept to such effect at the trial of one of his friends that the jurors and the presiding magistrate all joined in and promptly voted for the defendant to be freed.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the Romans should have had the same word, ‘
actor
’, for both a prosecutor and a performer on a stage. Socially, the gulf between the two of them was vast, but in terms of technique there was often little to choose. Rome’s leading orator in
the decade following Sulla’s death, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, was notorious for apeing the gestures of a mime-artist. Like Caesar, he was a celebrated fop, who ‘would arrange the folds of his toga with great care and exactness’,
¹⁹
then use his hands and the sweep of his arms as extensions of his voice. He did this with such grace that the stars of the Roman stage would stand in the audience whenever he spoke, studying and copying his every gesture. Like actors, orators were celebrities, gawped at and gossiped about. Hortensius himself was nicknamed ‘Dionysia’, after a famous dancing girl, but he could afford to brush all such insults aside. The prestige he won as Rome’s leading orator was worth any number of jeers.

Naturally, there were always opponents looking to snatch his crown. It was not in the Romans’ nature to tolerate any king – or queen – for very long. Hortensius’ own pre-eminence had been established during the years of Sulla’s dictatorship, when the law courts had been muzzled. Committed to upholding the Senate’s authority, he was strongly identified with the new regime. Such was his friendship with the dictator that it was Hortensius who had delivered Sulla’s funeral speech.
*
In the following decade his authority as a dominant member of the Senate inevitably served to buttress his legal reputation. But as the seventies
BC
wore on Hortensius’ pre-eminence came increasingly under threat, not from a fellow member of the senatorial establishment, not even from a member of the nobility, but from a man who was an upstart in every way.

Like Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero was a native of the small hill town of Arpinum – and, like Marius, he was filled with ambition. There the resemblance ended. Gawky and skinny, with a long, thin
neck, Cicero was never going to make a great soldier. Instead, even from his childhood, he planned to become the greatest orator in Rome. Sent to the capital as a boy in the nineties, Cicero’s precocious aptitude for rhetoric was such that the fathers of his fellow students would come to his school just to hear him declaim. The anecdote can only have derived from the infant prodigy himself, and even to the Romans – who never regarded modesty as a virtue – Cicero’s conceit was something monstrous. Not unjustified, however. His vanity was as much prickliness as self-promotion. A deeply sensitive man, Cicero was torn between a consciousness of his own great talents and a paranoia that snobbery might prevent others from giving them their due. In fact, his potential was so evident that it had been spotted early by some of the most influential figures in Rome. One of these, Marcus Antonius, provided the young Cicero with a particularly encouraging role-model. Despite coming from an undistinguished family himself, Antonius’ powers of oratory had succeeded in elevating him to both the consulship and the censorship, and a status as a leading spokesman of the senatorial elite. He was one of a clique of orators who dominated both the law courts and the Senate throughout the nineties, the spokesmen for an aggressive conservatism, strongly opposed to Marius and to anyone who threatened the traditional status quo. Cicero, who was always prone to hero-worship, never forgot him. Antonius and his colleagues were to prove a formative influence on what was already a passion for the Republic’s ancient order. Despite the fact that it was this same order that placed so many obstacles on the path of his advancement, Cicero never wavered in his belief that it embodied the acme of constitutional perfection. During the eighties, as the Republic began its collapse into civil war, this conviction was only reinforced.

Antonius himself was murdered following Marius’
putsch
in 87
BC
. His head was displayed in the Forum and his body fed to birds and
dogs. The finest orators of their generation were culled along with him. The stage had now been swept clear of competition, but Cicero, unnerved by the murder of his patrons, elected to keep his head down. He spent the years of civil war studying and honing his rhetorical skills, and not until 81, when he was already in his mid-twenties, did he finally plead in his first trial. Sulla had just resigned the dictatorship, but Cicero still had to move warily. A year after his debut in the law courts he agreed to defend the son of an Umbrian landowner charged with parricide. The case was politically highly sensitive. As Cicero was to demonstrate, the murdered man’s name had been illegally slipped on to a proscription list by one of Sulla’s favourite freedmen, who had then trumped up the charge of parricide to cover his tracks. The defendant was duly acquitted. Sulla did nothing to indicate that he was in any way displeased. Cicero’s reputation was made.

But not yet to his own satisfaction. Aiming for the political heights as he was, he knew that he first had to seize Hortensius’ oratorical crown. Accordingly, he threw himself into defence work, taking on other prominent cases and using the courts to test himself to the emotional and physical limits, ‘drawing on all the strength of my voice and the effort of my whole body’.
²⁰
After barely two years of public life he found himself near breakdown. Warned by his doctors that he was putting a terminal strain on his throat, Cicero took leave of absence and headed for Greece. For six months he stayed in Athens, sight-seeing and indulging in a spot of recreational philosophy. The city still bore the scars left by Sulla’s legions, but for the Romans, Athens remained inviolably the home of beauty and culture. Tourists had begun returning there even as blood was drying in the streets. Among them had been an old schoolfriend of Cicero, Titus Pomponius, a prudent refugee from the judicial murders back in Rome. Recognising the bottom of a market when he saw it, Pomponius had invested his inheritance in
provincial real estate, then used the profits to fund a life of cultured leisure in the shadow of the Parthenon. Eight years later he still had not the slightest intention of returning to Rome. His friends called him ‘Atticus’, a nickname that suggests how distinctive his expatriate lifestyle was perceived to be. Even so, he was a straw in the wind. ‘Atticus’ was not the only wealthy citizen to have witnessed a decade of violence and political collapse, and decided that there might be no shame in embracing a life of secluded ease.