Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (38 page)

At first the emptiness appeared to mock the scale of Crassus’ preparations. Ahead of his army, to the east, nothing could be seen save the haze of the heat. Then, at length, the advance guard came across hoofprints, the tracks of what appeared to be a large cavalry division. These turned aside from the road and vanished into the desert. Crassus decided to follow them. Soon the legions found themselves marching across a desolate plain with not a stream, nor even a blade of grass, in sight, only scorching dunes of sand. The
Romans began to wilt. Crassus’ ablest lieutenant, a quaestor by the name of Cassius Longinus, urged his general to turn round, but Crassus, so skilled at making strategic retreats in the political arena, would not hear of it now. On the legions advanced. Then came the news for which their general had been hoping. The Parthians were near, and not just a cavalry division, but a large army. Eager to ensure that the enemy did not escape him, Crassus ordered on his legions. They were now in the heart of the baking, sandy plain. They could make out horsemen ahead of them, shabby and dusty. The legionaries locked shields. As they did so, the Parthians dropped aside their robes to reveal that both they and their horses were clad in glittering mail. At the same moment, from all around the plain, came the eerie sound of drums and clanging bells, a din ‘like the roaring of wild predators, but intermingled with the sharpness of a thunderclap’.
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To the Romans, it seemed barely human, a hallucination bred from the shimmering heat. Hearing it, they shuddered.

And all that long day was to have the pattern of a bad dream. The Parthians fled every effort to engage them, fading like mirages across the dunes, but armed, as they wheeled and galloped away, with steel-tipped arrows, which they fired into the sweating, parched, immobile ranks of legionaries. When Publius led his Gauls in pursuit, they were surrounded by the enemy’s heavy cavalry and wiped out. Publius himself was decapitated, and a Parthian horseman, brandishing the head on a spear, galloped along the ranks of Romans, jeering them and screaming insults at Publius’ father. By now the legions were surrounded. All day long the Parthians’ deadly arrows rained down upon them, and all day long, doggedly, heroically, the legions held out. With the blessed coming of dusk the shattered remnants of Crassus’ great expedition began to withdraw, retracing their steps to Carrhae, the nearest city of any size. From there, under the resourceful leadership of Cassius, a few straggling survivors made their way back across the Roman frontier.
They left behind them twenty thousand of their compatriots dead on the battlefield, and ten thousand more as prisoners. Seven eagles had been lost. Not since Cannae had a Roman army suffered such a catastrophic defeat.

Crassus himself, stupefied by the utter ruin of all his hopes, was lured by the Parthians into a parley. Having tricked so many, he now found himself tricked in his turn. Caught up in a scuffle, he was struck down. Death spared Crassus a humiliating ordeal. Baulked of their prey, the Parthians inflicted it instead on an impersonator drawn from the ranks of their prisoners. Dressed as a woman, escorted by lictors whose rods were adorned by moneybags, and axes by legionaries’ heads, followed by jeering prostitutes, the captive was led in a savage parody of a triumph. Clearly, the Parthians knew more of Roman military traditions then the Romans had known of theirs.

Meanwhile, the head of the real Crassus had been dispatched to the court of the Parthian king. It arrived just as a celebrated actor, Jason of Tralles, was singing a scene from Euripides’ great tragedy,
The Bacchae.
By a gruesome coincidence, this was a play that featured a severed head. Jason, with the quick thinking of a true professional, seized the gory trophy and cradled it in his arms, then improvised an apt soliloquy. Unsurprisingly, the spectacle of Crassus as a prop in his own tragedy brought the house down.

For a man who had aimed so high and been brought so low, no more fitting end could have been devised.

The sky, after all, had not proved the limit.

It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their
empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic’s greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Romans’ concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist that they had won their empire purely in self-defence. To people who had been flattened by the legions, this argument may have appeared laughable, but the Romans believed it all the same, and often with a deadly seriousness. Opposition to Crassus’ war against Parthia, for instance, had been bitter. Everyone knew that there had been no excuse for it save greed. The blood-soaked sands of Carrhae showed that the gods had known this too.

All the same, Crassus was not the only man to have dreamed of pushing Rome’s supremacy to the limits of the world. Something was changing in the mood of the Republic. Globalising fantasies were much in the air. The globe itself could be found on coins as well as triumphal floats. The old suspicion of empire was fading fast. Overseas commitments, it appeared, could be made to work. Even the most conservative elements in the Senate were coming to accept this. In 58 Cato had left Rome for the island of Cyprus. His mission was to annexe it. Originally, he had been violently opposed to such a policy, not least because it had been proposed by Clodius, who planned to use revenues from Cyprus to fund his extravagant corn dole. But when the tribune, with typically malevolent cunning, had proposed that his most upright opponent be sent to administer Rome’s new possession, and the Senate had enthusiastically agreed, Cato had felt duty bound to go. Arriving in Cyprus, he had exercised his duties with his customary scrupulousness. The Cypriots had been given peace and good government, and the Roman people the old ruler’s treasure. Cato had returned home loaded with silver and a library of account books. So delighted had the Senate been by the honest dealings it found transcribed within them that it had awarded Cato the privilege of wearing a toga edged with purple – an extravagance that Cato had sternly turned down.

Even so, he was proud of what he had achieved in Cyprus – not only for the Republic, but for the provincials themselves. It appeared to him self-evident that the rule of an upstanding Roman administrator was vastly preferable to the squalid anarchy that had prevailed in Cyprus before his arrival. Here was a portentous development: the Senate’s most unbending traditionalist squaring Rome’s ancient virtues with her new world role. Greek intellectuals, of course, had long been pushing for this – as Cato would well have known, for he was a keen scholar of philosophy, which he studied with the seriousness he brought to all he did. It was Posidonius, every Roman’s favourite guru, who had argued that subject peoples should welcome their conquest by the Republic, since it would contribute towards the building of a commonwealth of man. Now the Romans themselves were latching on to the same argument. Assumptions that would have been unthinkable even a few decades previously were becoming commonplace. Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilising mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace. Morality had not merely caught up with the brute fact of imperial expansion, but wanted more.

It helped, of course, that the empire brought colour and clamour to Rome, the news of conquests from strange, far-distant lands, the flooding of gold through her streets. Throughout the sixties
BC
the Romans had associated such pleasures with the name of Pompey. Now, in the fifties, they could enjoy them again, courtesy of Caesar. Even in the dankest reaches of Gaul, the proconsul never forgot his audience back at home. He lavished his attentions on them. He had always taken pleasure in spending money on other people – it was one of the qualities that made him loved – and now, at last, that money was his own. Gallic plunder flowed south.
Caesar was generous to everyone: his friends, anyone he thought might prove useful, and the whole of Rome. Preparations began to be made for a huge extension of the Forum, one that could hardly fail to keep his name on everybody’s lips. But if Caesar aimed to woo his fellow citizens with gargantuan complexes of marble, he also wished to entertain them, to have them thrill to the glamour of his exploits. His dispatches were masterpieces of war reporting. No Roman could read them without feeling a rush of excitement and pride. Caesar knew how to make his fellow citizens feel good about themselves. As so often before, he was putting on a show – and as an arena he had the entire, spectacular expanse of Gaul.

Of course, in March 56
BC
, had it not been for his quick thinking and diplomatic skills, he might have lost it to Domitius Ahenobarbus. The risk had forced him to move fast. It had been Caesar who had suggested the meetings at Ravenna and Lucca with Crassus and Pompey. He had felt no particular jealousy of the ambitions of his two partners in the triumvirate. As far as he had been concerned, they could have whatever they wanted, just as long as he was allowed another five years as governor of Gaul.

While Caesar saw to the diplomacy at Ravenna and Lucca that would secure this, he knew that he was urgently needed in Britanny. A legion had been stationed there for the winter, and, with food supplies running low, its commander had been forced to send out foraging parties. Straying into the territory of a local tribe, the Venetians, some requisition officers had been kidnapped. The Venetians themselves, who had been forced to hand over hostages to the Romans the previous autumn, had hopefully suggested a swap, but while this was an offer that might have seemed reasonable enough to them, it had betrayed a woeful misunderstanding of their enemy. In their innocence the Venetians had assumed that the Romans were playing by the accepted rules of tribal warfare, in which hit-and-run raids and ambushes, tit-for-tat skirmishes and
hostage-taking, were all taken for granted. To the Romans, however, such tactics were terrorism, and punishable as such. Caesar prepared to teach the Venetians a devastating lesson. Because they were a maritime power, he ordered one of his ablest officers, Decimus Brutus, to construct a war fleet. The Venetian ships, taken by surprise, were wiped out. The tribe had no choice but to surrender. Its elders were executed and the rest of the population sold as slaves. Caesar, who normally prided himself on his clemency, had decided on this occasion ‘to make an example of the enemy, so that in future the barbarians would be more careful about respecting the rights of ambassadors’
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– by which, of course, he meant his requisition officers. The double-speak betrayed his real agenda. The Gauls had to be woken up to a new reality: from now on it was Caesar who would be setting the rules. Tribal squabblings and rebellions were things of the past. The country was to be at peace – a peace policed and upheld by Rome.

The brutal punishment of the Venetians had its desired effect. That winter, the mood throughout Gaul was one of sullen submission. Most tribes had still not measured themselves against the Romans, but rumour had done its work, and it was now widely known that the terrifying newcomers had proved themselves invincible wherever they had been met in combat. Only into the dense forests of Germany, it appeared, had the news failed to penetrate. In the spring of 55
BC
, two tribes made the mistake of crossing the Rhine into Gaul. Caesar’s patience with fractious natives was by now wearing thin. The invaders were summarily wiped out. Then, in order to deliver the barbarians beyond the Rhine an unmistakable warning, Caesar crossed the river himself. He did this not in a boat – a mode of transport that struck him as ‘beneath his dignity’
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– but over a specially constructed bridge. The engineering brilliance required to build it spoke as loudly of Roman power as did the bristling discipline of the legions who
crossed it: the Germans on the far bank took one look at the monstrous wooden structure rising out of the rushing currents and melted into the woods. These, the fabled forests of Germany, were the subject of many tall tales. They were said to be the haunt of strange monsters, and to stretch so interminably that a man could walk for two months and still not leave them behind. Caesar, peering into their murk, had no intention of putting such stories to the test: leaving the Germans to cower in the shadows, he burned their villages and crops, then crossed the Rhine back to Gaul. The bridge, constructed with such skill and effort, he ordered to be pulled down.

Caesar had always had a penchant for spectacular acts of demolition. After all, only a decade previously he had levelled his new villa and thereby made himself the talk of Rome. The iron-bodied general who always snatched his soldier’s rations in the saddle, who was capable of inspiring whole legions with his courage, who shared every rigour and hardship that he imposed upon his men, sleeping on frozen ground wrapped only in his cloak, was still the flamboyant Caesar of old. The tastes he had indulged as a rake, for excitement and grand gestures, now infused his strategy as a proconsul of the Roman people. As ever, he looked to dazzle, to overawe. The building and levelling of a bridge across the Rhine had served only to whet his appetite for even more spectacular exploits. So it was that no sooner had Caesar crossed his men back into Gaul than he was marching them northwards, towards the Channel coast and the encircling Ocean.

Set within its icy waters waited the fabulous island of Britain. It was as drenched in mystery as in rain and fog. Back in Rome people doubted whether it existed at all. Even traders and merchants, Caesar’s usual sources of information, could provide only the sketchiest of details. Their reluctance to travel widely through the island was hardly surprising. It was well known that barbarians
became more savage the further north one travelled, indulging in any number of unspeakable habits, such as cannibalism, and even – repellently – the drinking of milk. To teach them respect for the name of the Republic would be an achievement of Homeric proportions. For Caesar, who never let anyone forget that he could trace his ancestry back to the time of the Trojan War, the temptation was irresistible.