Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (34 page)

His plan was simple: seduce the mob and seize control of the streets. So criminal, so outrageous was this policy that in more settled times surely not even Clodius would have dared conceive it. With the events of Caesar’s consulship, however, the fatal toxin of violence had been reintroduced to the Republic, and its poison was spreading fast. The triumvirate wished to maintain its stranglehold; the conservatives in the Senate wished to break free; both sides needed an ally prepared to dirty his hands. Clodius, promoting himself as just such a man, began alternately to woo and menace the two sides. ‘Selling himself now to this client,’ Cicero sneered, ‘now to that’
¹⁴
– a whore, just like his sister. But Clodius’ capriciousness disguised a savage sense of focus. In his ambitions, if not his loyalties, he was utterly constant. He wished to prove himself worthy of his family name. And in addition, of course, he wished to see Cicero destroyed.

In December Clodius took up his tribunate. He had prepared for the moment with great care. A raft of legislation was immediately laid before the people. The bills were crowd-pleasers all. Most blatantly eye-catching was a proposal to replace the subsidised grain supplies established by Cato with a free monthly dole. The slums duly seethed with gratitude, but Clodius had no illusions that this counted for much in itself. Of all the many treacherous foundations upon which a nobleman might build a career, none was more shifting than the affections of the poor: just as discipline made an army, so the lack of it made a mob. But what if a way could be found to mobilise the slums? This was the question that Clodius, surreptitiously, had introduced in the form of an innocuous-sounding second bill. He proposed that the Compitalia be restored to its full glory; the
collegia
too. All across the vast sprawl of Rome, wherever there were crossroads, the banned clubs would be reformed.
Clodius, with his gangster swagger, had always cut a dash as their patron. Now, if the law could only be passed, they would be bound to him for ever. Wherever there was a crossroads he would have a private gang.

This was a potentially massive innovation. Indeed, so massive an innovation was it that the Senate entirely failed to recognise it as such. The idea that a nobleman and the poor might have intimate bonds of obligation was entirely alien to the Roman mind, nor could anyone even conceive what the consequences might be. As a result, Clodius found it easy to force through the measure. He dealt with what limited opposition there was contemptuously, by twisting arms and greasing palms. Even Cicero was bought off. Using Atticus as a go-between, Clodius promised not to prosecute him over the executions of the conspirators, and Cicero, after much havering, agreed in return not to attack his enemy’s bills. In early January 58 the legislation was passed. On the same day Clodius and his heavies occupied the temple of Castor, a convenient stone’s throw away from the centre of the Forum. Here was where the
collegia
were to be organised. The space around the temple began to fill with tradesmen and artisans from the crossroads, chanting Clodius’ name and jeering at his opponents. The steps to the temple itself were demolished, leaving the podium as a fortress. The
collegia
were restructured on paramilitary lines. The threat of violence grew ever more palpable in the air. Then, suddenly, the storm broke. When one of Caesar’s lieutenants was arraigned for prosecution and appealed to the tribune for help, Clodius’ gangs piled in, mugging the judge where he sat and smashing up the court. The trial itself was permanently abandoned. As an exercise in controlled thuggery, its success appears to have exceeded the expectations of even Clodius himself.

It certainly prostrated Cicero. Not only had his deadliest enemy revealed an alarming talent for organised violence, but he had also publicly aligned himself with the interests of Caesar. Since the end
of his consulship, the new governor of Gaul had been lurking beyond the city’s boundary, keeping track of events in Rome. Now he watched on in studied silence as Clodius prepared for his revenge. Trampling on the spirit, if not the letter, of his agreement with Cicero, the tribune brought forward yet another bill. Dressed up as a statement of stern republican principle, it proposed that any citizen guilty of putting another to death without trial should be sent into exile. There was no need to mention names. Everyone knew its target. With this deft push, Cicero was sent slithering and slipping towards the brink.

Scrabbling desperately to haul himself back, he grew his hair, put on mourning and toured the streets. Clodius’ gangs dogged him, hurling abuse, stones and shit. Hortensius, trying to rally to his old rival’s support, was cornered and almost lynched. Wherever Cicero looked, he found the escape routes blocked. The consuls, respectable senators who would normally have stood up for him, had been bribed with lucrative provincial commands. The Senate was cowed. Caesar, when Cicero brought himself to grovel in the proconsul’s tent, was apologetic, but shrugged his shoulders and said that there was nothing he could do. Perhaps, he suggested silkily, Cicero might care to reconsider his opposition to the triumvirate and take a post on the governor’s staff in Gaul? No matter how desperate Cicero’s plight, that would have been a humiliation too far. Even exile was preferable to abject dishonour. Briefly, Cicero thought of fighting back, of organising street gangs of his own, but he was dissuaded by his friends. It was Hortensius, still covered in scars and bruises, who advised him to cut his losses and go. Stunned by the scale and suddenness of the catastrophe, taunted by the jeering from the pickets outside his house, contemplating the ruin of a lifetime’s achievement, Cicero numbly prepared for his departure. Only in the dead of night did he at last dare steal out from his house. Travelling on foot to avoid attention
from Clodius’ gangs, he slunk through the streets towards the city gates. By dawn he was safely on the Appian Way. Behind him, as the morning hearth fires began to be lit, Rome shimmered and then vanished beneath a haze of brown smoke.

As the news began to spread through the waking city, Clodius was as stunned as everyone else. In an ecstasy of triumphalism his mobs surged up the Palatine and occupied Cicero’s house. The wretched exile’s mansion, his pride and joy, the most visible and public mark of his rank, was trashed. Then the demolition men moved in. Watched by a packed Forum, the house was torn to pieces, block by block, while next to it, casting the rubble in its imposing shadow, Clodius’ mansion stood proud and inviolate. Just in case this act of vengeance was mistaken for mob violence, rather than the justified punishment of an enemy of the people, the tribune rushed through yet another bill, formally condemning Cicero by name. On the building site where the criminal’s mansion had once stood, a temple to Liberty was raised. The remaining land was annexed by Clodius himself. All was transcribed on to a tablet of bronze, which the tribune, stern-faced, then carried to the Capitol and placed on public display. Here they were to stay for eternity, testifying to his glory, and to Cicero’s crimes.

No wonder that the struggle for pre-eminence in the Republic was growing so savage, when the rewards could be so sweet.

As Cicero dragged himself disconsolately from Rome, into an exile that would ultimately see him holed up in Macedon, Caesar headed north. Now that the end-game between the great orator and Clodius appeared to have played itself out, the governor of Gaul could no longer afford to linger on in the outskirts of the capital.
Throughout the Alps trouble was threatening. German war bands had begun to flood across the Rhine, and waves from the incursions were already lapping against the Roman frontier.

Caesar, travelling as usual at a furious speed, headed directly for the point of maximum pressure. Eight days after leaving Rome he arrived in Geneva. Just beyond Lake Leman a vast and menacing wagon train was parked on the border. The Helvetians, natives of the Alps, had tired of their mountain home and wished to strike out west. The new governor, recognising a golden opportunity when he saw it, played for time. First, he announced to the tribesmen that he would consider their request to pass through Roman territory – then promptly sealed off the border. Five extra legions, two of them recruited from scratch, were force-marched to man it. The Helvetians, finding the frontier blocked, began to skirt its length, their long wagon train lumbering westwards, 360,000 men, women and children on the march. Caesar shadowed them, passing across the frontier and into free Gaul. Taking the Helvetians by surprise, he ambushed their rearguard and then, when the tribesmen attacked Caesar in turn, defeated them a second time in a ferocious battle. The survivors sued for terms. Caesar ordered them back home.

It had been a stunning victory – and thoroughly illegal. The previous year sweeping new measures had come into effect, specifically designed to regulate abuses by provincial governors and restrain their ambitions. Their author had been none other than Caesar himself. Now, by picking a fight with a tribe not subject to the Republic, on territory not ruled by the Republic, he had flagrantly broken his own law. His enemies back in Rome were quick to point this out. In time, Cato would even propose that Caesar be handed over to the tribes he had assaulted. To many in the Senate, the Gallic adventure appeared both unwarranted and unjust.

Not to most citizens, however. One man’s war criminal was another man’s hero. Barbarian migrations had always been the stuff
of Roman nightmares. Whenever wagons began rumbling across the north, the reverberations would echo far away in the Forum. The Republic had no fiercer bogeyman than the pale-skinned, horse-maned, towering Gaul. Hannibal might have ridden up to Rome’s gates and flung his javelin over them, but he had never succeeded in capturing the seat of the Republic. Only the Gauls had managed that. Way back, at the beginning of the fourth century
BC,
a barbarian horde had burst without warning across the Alps, sent a Roman army fleeing from it in panic, and swept into Rome. The Capitol alone had remained sacrosanct, and even that would have fallen had not the sacred geese of Juno alerted the garrison to a surprise attack. When the Gauls, having slaughtered, looted and burned at will, had withdrawn as suddenly as they had come, they had left behind them a city resolved never again to endure such indignities. This was the steel that had enabled Rome to become the mistress of the world.

Even three centuries later, however, memories of the Gauls remained raw. Every year guard-dogs would be crucified, a posthumous punishment of the dogs who had failed to bark on the Capitol, while Juno’s geese, as an ongoing reward for their ancestors’ admonitory honking, were brought to watch the spectacle on cushions of purple and gold. A more practical measure was the setting aside of an emergency fund, to be used only in the event of a second barbarian invasion. Even now that the Republic was a superpower this was regarded as an eminently sensible precaution. When men lived not as citizens but halfway to beasts there could be no knowing when their savagery might not suddenly erupt. Within living memory a nation of giants, three hundred thousand of them, it was reckoned, had appeared suddenly from the wastelands of the north, destroying everything in their way, subhuman monsters from the icy rim of the world. Their men had eaten raw flesh; their women had attacked legionaries with their bare hands. Had Marius,
in two brilliant victories, not managed to annihilate the invaders, then Rome, and the world with her, would surely have come to an end.

Scares on this scale were not quickly forgotten. No wonder that most citizens, when they heard the news of the Helvetians’ defeat, cared nothing for the laws that might have been broken to achieve it. After all, what greater duty did a proconsul have than to secure the safety of Rome? Caesar himself scrupulously refuted the charge of glory-hunting. The security of his province, and Italy too, had been at stake. For as long as there were restless tribes beyond the Roman frontier, ignorant of the conventions of civilised behaviour, the danger would persist. By this logic, familiar to generations of Romans, the assault on the Helvetians could be reckoned an act of self-defence. So too Caesar’s ongoing campaign – for having dispatched the Helvetians back to their homeland, to serve as a buffer between the Germans and his province, he had next swung east to attack the Germans themselves. The fact that their king had been given the official title of ‘friend of the Roman people’ cut no ice with Caesar. The Germans were successfully provoked into offering battle, defeated, then driven back across the Rhine. There, in the dark, dripping woods, they were welcome to lurk, but not near Caesar’s province – nor anywhere in Gaul.