Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (21 page)

Behind the embankments raised by Sulla, however, there was a constant churning pressure. The attachment of citizens to their ancient rights was not easily diverted, and legislation against the tribunate in particular was massively resented. In 75
BC
, only three years after Sulla’s death, the crucial law that had prohibited tribunes from holding further office was swept away. Despite a desperate manning of the dykes by Sulla’s supporters, a sizeable majority of senators ended up supporting the measure. Some caved in to a violent protest movement, others were just as likely to have been
influenced by personal ambition, or by feuds with opponents, or by ties of obligation, or by totally obscure factors. Motives in Rome had always been opaque. As the traditional order of the Republic began to reassert itself, so too did the old incalculability of Roman politics. Sulla’s dream – that there should be a single, public conduit to power – was crumbling along with his settlement.

How was it, for instance, that even the ineffably prestige-laden Catulus might on occasions be outsmarted in the Senate by a notorious turncoat, Publius Cethegus? Like Verres, Cethegus had switched to Sulla just in time to save his skin. During the siege of Praeneste he had persuaded his former colleagues to surrender, then coolly turned them over to Sulla’s stormtroopers for execution. Thoroughbreds such as Catulus regarded him with revulsion, but Cethegus was hardly the man to care. Rather than compete for public honours, as a Roman nobleman was expected to do, he instead wheeled and dealed behind the scenes, bribing, cajoling and scheming his way to the control of a vast bloc of senators’ votes. This was a political weapon that even the snootiest of aristocrats could respect. Any time an appointment needed fixing, or a bill had to be finessed, the midnight visitors would start flitting to and from Cethegus’ doors.

The idea that power might be separable from glory in this way was mystifying to most Romans; disturbing too. In any election Cethegus’ unsavoury reputation would have proved lethal to his hopes. His prestige was that of a lobbyist, nothing more. No Roman who aimed for the consulship could afford to keep to the disreputable backrooms in which Cethegus lurked. The established aristocracy might sometimes find themselves reduced to employing him, but their reluctance to emulate his career pattern spoke loudly of their disdain. Yet there was one nobleman, of high birth and overweening, almost threatening prestige, who had already long surpassed Cethegus in the dark arts of political fixing, and who had
never betrayed the slightest scruples about doing so; who glided with equal facility through the shadows and the brilliant glare of public life; who ‘would go to any effort, make himself amenable to anyone he came across, just so long as he obtained what he wanted’.
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And what Marcus Crassus wanted was clear: to be the leading citizen in the state.

In the years following Sulla’s death, although he was yet to win the praetorship, still less become consul, there were those who regarded Crassus as already closing in on that ambition. The row with Sulla had proved only a limited setback. Indeed, in some ways it had served to enhance Crassus’ prestige. Unlike Catulus, he stood at a remove from the dictator’s regime. This was how he preferred to operate, without ties or obligations to any cause except his own. Principles, to Crassus, were merely gambits in a vast and complex game, to be adopted then sacrificed as strategy required. Rather than risk leaving his fingermarks on anything, he employed proxies to test the limits on his behalf. Of such willing dependants he had an endless supply. Crassus was assiduous at cultivating men on the make. Whether he wished to help promote them to high office or merely have them serve him as patsies or ciphers, he would treat them all with the same menacing geniality, keeping open house, avoiding airs, remembering the name of anyone he ever met. In the law courts he would tirelessly plead for defendants who might later provide him with a return. A debt taken out with Crassus always came with heavy interest.

Not for nothing did he operate as the Senate’s banker. Crassus had deeper funds than anyone else in Rome. Slaves, mines and real estate remained his principal investments, but he regarded no scam as too low if it would add to his coffers. Whenever a house went up in flames, Crassus would have his private fire-brigade rush to the scene, then refuse to extinguish the fire until the owner had sold him the property cheap. Prosecuted for sleeping with a Vestal
Virgin – a particularly sacrilegious crime – he could protest that he had only seduced the woman in order to snap up her property, and be believed. Despite his reputation for avarice, however, Crassus lived simply, and when his interests were not at stake he could prove notoriously mean. A philosopher, Alexander, to whom Crassus had provided grudging hospitality, would be lent a cloak for journeys then required to give it back. Alexander, as a Greek, did not have the vote. Had he been a citizen, then he would have been encouraged to borrow far more than a cloak. The more eminent his status, the more spectacularly he would have been encouraged to fall into debt. Money was easily Crassus’ favourite instrument of power. The threads of gold he spun entangled the whole Republic. Little could happen in Rome of which Crassus was not immediately aware, sensitive as he was to every tremor, every fluttering of every fly caught in his web.

No wonder that he inspired in his fellow citizens a rare dread. Campaigners against Sulla’s laws would violently abuse other public figures, but never Crassus. Asked why, a tribune compared him not to a spider but to a bull with hay on its horns – ‘it being a custom among the Romans’, as Plutarch explains, ‘to tie hay round the horns of dangerous bulls, so that people who met them might be on their guard’.
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Such respect was what Crassus most craved. More clearly than anyone else in Rome, he had penetrated to the heart of the lesson of the civil wars: that the outward trappings of glory were nothing compared to pre-eminence among the people in the know. In a society such as the Republic, where envy and malice always followed fast on greatness, supremacy was a perilous status. Only if it inspired fear without undue resentment could it hope to endure. In the art of preserving such a balance Crassus ruled supreme.

Yet, to his chagrin, he found himself overshadowed by one rival to whom the laws of political gravity appeared simply not to apply. The show-stealer, as ever, was Pompey. Where Crassus manoeuvred
to enjoy the substance of power, Pompey never ceased to enjoy the glitter and clamour of its show. But by play-acting the general he rapidly became the genuine thing, and not merely a general, but the darling of Rome. The ‘teenage butcher’ had an innocent’s charm. ‘Nothing was more delicate than Pompey’s cheeks,’ we are told: ‘whenever he felt people’s eyes on him, he would go bright red.’
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To the public, such blushes were an endearing reminder of their hero’s youth, of the boyish modesty that appeared all the more estimable when set against the unparalleled arc of his rise. What citizen had not dared to imagine himself doing as Pompey had done, seizing the chance for glory with both hands and soaring towards the stars? The Romans’ tolerance of his career betrayed the depth of their crush. Far from provoking their jealousy, Pompey enabled them to live out – however vicariously – their deepest fantasies and dreams.

Pompey’s superstardom was something that even Sulla had been forced to respect. No one else had tested the limits of the dictator’s patience quite like Pompey, the spoiled and favoured son. After routing the Marian armies in Africa he had crossed back to Italy and refused a direct order to disband his legions – not with any intention of toppling Sulla’s regime, but because, like a small child with his eye on a new and glittering treat, he had wanted a triumph. Sulla, either in mockery or admiration, had agreed to confirm his protégé in the title awarded him by his troops: ‘Magnus’ – ‘The Great’. The granting of the supreme honour of a triumph, however, to a man who was not even a senator, had given him pause. Pompey, typically, had met condescension with impudence. ‘More people worship the rising than the setting sun,’
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he had told the ageing dictator to his face. Sulla, wearily, had at last given way. Pompey, no doubt blushing becomingly, had duly ridden in triumph through the streets, the spoils of his victories preceding him, cheered to the hilt by his adoring fans. And not even twenty-five.

After an excitement like that, the grind of a conventional political career was unappealing. No slogging after quaestorships for Pompey the Great. Having helped Catulus to put down the armed revolt that had followed Sulla’s death, he had then pulled his favourite stunt of refusing to disband his troops. Again, this had not been with any intention of carrying out a coup himself, but because he had been enjoying himself too much as a general to be prepared to give up his legions. Instead, he had demanded to be sent to Spain. The province was still infested with Marian rebels, and the Senate, in confirming Pompey’s command, had not been merely surrendering to blackmail. The war against the rebels promised to be deeply unglamorous, with plenty of hazards and few rewards. Catulus and his colleagues had been glad to see Pompey go.

Crassus, too, must have hoped that his young rival was riding for a fall. Once again, however, Pompey was to prove himself insufferably successful. Gruelling though the war did indeed prove to be, the rebel armies were gradually subdued. Crassus, who never ceased to regard Pompey’s title of Magnus as a joke, began to hear it used ever less ironically by everyone around him. In 73
BC
, the year in which Crassus became praetor, Pompey was busy extinguishing the final embers of rebellion, and settling Spain to his own immense advantage. In the province that had provided Crassus with his first army, Pompey was now securing a client base as well. Soon he would be returning to Rome, trailing clouds of glory, his army of seasoned veterans at his back. No doubt he would demand a second triumph. After that, who could tell?

Crassus, faced with a threat like Pompey, appears to have reevaluated his strategy. Immense though his own prestige was, it remained half in the shadows. Now was the time to move into the full glare of public approbation. Crassus was no Cethegus. He knew perfectly well that power without glory would always be limited, especially in competition with a rival such as Pompey. He needed a
smashing victory of his own, and fast. But where? And against whom? Suitable enemies were in frustratingly short supply.

And then suddenly, like a storm out of the blue, his opportunity arrived.

That midsummer of 73 there was a breakout from a gladiatorial school in Campania. Like shellfish and luxury accommodation, such schools had become increasingly big business in the region. Gladiators were very much a home-grown speciality. Long before the arrival of Rome on the scene, tombs across Campania and Samnium had been the settings for duels between armed warriors, staged in honour of the spirits of the ever-thirsty dead. Even as the rituals of blood-spilling began to be commercialised by a growing Roman interest in them, gladiators continued to dress in the style of Samnite warriors, complete with brimmed helmets and ungainly, bobbing crests. As time went by, and Samnite independence faded into history, so the appearance of these fighters came to seem ever more exotic – like that of animals preserved from extinction in a zoo.

To the Romans themselves, the whiff of the foreign that clung to gladiatorial combat was always a crucial part of its appeal. As the Republic’s wars became ever more distant from Italy, so it was feared that the martial character of the people might start to fade. In 105
BC
the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries, but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies – if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls. Yet this spectacle of savagery, staged in the Forum, the very heart of Rome,
inspired emotions of admiration as well as loathing and contempt. The upper classes might like to pretend that the games existed for the benefit of the
plebs
, but the example of a gladiator’s courage could affect anyone. ‘Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,’ enthused the sophisticated Cicero. ‘And suppose a gladiator has been brought to the ground, when do you ever see one twist his neck away after he has been ordered to extend it for the deathblow?’
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Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired.

Distorted though the reflection may have been, the gladiator held up a mirror to the watching crowd. He enabled the Romans to witness the consequence of their addiction to glory in its rawest, most extreme and most debased form. The difference between a senator campaigning for the consulship and a gladiator fighting for his life was only one of degree. A Roman was brought up to thrill to the spectacle of both. In a society such as the Republic, fascination with the violence of the arena came naturally. The more excessive its gore-spattered theatricality, the more the Romans found themselves craving it. But the carnage also served them as a deadly warning. Gladiatorial combat was evidence of what might happen once the spirit of competition was given free rein, once men started to fight each other not as Romans, bound by the restraints of custom and obligation, but as brutes. Blood on the sand, corpses dragged away on hooks. Should the frameworks of the Republic collapse, as they had almost done during the years of civil war, then such might be the fate of everyone, citizen as well as slave.