Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (41 page)

It was the perfect strategy. As the sense of crisis steadily deepened, the mood in the Republic began to turn brutal as well as fetid. In his desperation to find a forceful counterweight to Pompey, Cato had settled upon an extraordinary choice. His favoured candidate for the consulship of 52 was none other than Clodius’ old sparring-partner, the turbulent street-brawler Milo. Once a ferocious partisan of Pompey, Milo had been unceremoniously dumped by the great man, and was therefore happy to throw his lot in with Cato and his plans. Pompey warned his former protégé to stand down, and when Milo refused threw his weight behind rival candidates. But his fury was, of course, nothing compared to that of Milo’s deadliest enemy. For three years Clodius had been on his
best behaviour, attempting to rebrand himself as a sound and sober statesman, but the prospect of having Milo as a consul was too much. Like a reformed alcoholic reaching for a bottle, Clodius returned to the streets. His old gangs were resurrected. In reply Milo bought up the gladiator schools. As 53
BC
drew to a close, Rome descended into anarchy. So too did the Republic. For the third time in four years elections were postponed, this time because the presiding official had been knocked out by a brick. With all public business in abeyance, club-wielding mobsters roamed the streets, while law-abiding citizens cowered where they could.

It seemed that things could hardly become any worse. Then, on 18 January 52
BC
, they did. Clodius and Milo met face to face on the Appian Way. Taunts flew; one of Milo’s gladiators flung a javelin; Clodius was struck in the shoulder. His bodyguards hauled their wounded leader to a nearby tavern, but Milo’s heavies, following in pursuit, overpowered them. Clodius himself was slung out of the tavern on to the road, where he was speedily finished off. There, by the side of a shrine to the Good Goddess, his corpse was left mangled and naked in the dust. It appeared that the goddess had at last had her revenge.

But Clodius’ friends claimed differently. After his body had been found and brought back to Rome, the news of his murder spread quickly from crossroad to crossroad. The slums began to echo with wails of lamentation. Soon crowds were massing outside Clodius’ mansion on the Palatine. Fulvia showed them the gashed body of her husband, carefully pointing out each wound. The mob howled in misery and rage. The next day the corpse of the people’s hero was borne from the Palatine, across the Forum, and laid on the rostra. Meanwhile, in the neighbouring Senate House benches were kicked over, tables smashed, clerical records plundered. Then, on the floor of the chamber, a pyre was raised. Clodius was laid upon it. A torch was brought. More than thirty years had passed since the destruction
of Jupiter’s temple on the Capitol, warning the Roman people of coming catastrophe. Now, once again, the Forum was lit a violent red. In the flickering glare battles between the partisans of Clodius and those of his murderer reached a new and intoxicating pitch of savagery. Still the flames raged, and as the Senate House crashed into blackened ruin they spread to a neighbouring monument: the Basilica Porcia. Here was where Rome’s first permanent law court had been built – by an ancestor of Cato, no less. In a spectacle loaded with pointed and deliberate symbolism, it too was consumed. That night, when Clodius’ partisans feasted in honour of their dead leader, they did so amid the ashes of the Senate’s authority.

Now at last Pompey’s moment had come. Even Cato, gazing at the charred shell of his ancestor’s monument, had to accept that. Anything was preferable to anarchy. He still could not bring himself to accept a dictatorship, but proposed as a compromise that Pompey should serve for the year as sole consul. The paradoxical nature of such an office was indication enough of the monstrous nature of the times. The Senate met in Pompey’s theatre, and on Bibulus’ motion invited the great man to rescue the Republic. Pompey obliged with brisk and military efficiency. For the first time since the civil war, armed troops were marched into Rome. The gangs of Clodius and Milo proved no match for Pompey’s legionaries. Milo himself was speedily put on trial. Since the charge was the murder of Clodius, Cicero leapt at the chance to defend him. It was his hope, in such a cause, to deliver the speech of his life. His opportunity came on the last day of the trial. That morning he crossed from his mansion on the Palatine to the law courts. Eerie and unprecedented silence cloaked the city. All the shops had been boarded up. Guards had been posted on the corner of every street. Pompey himself was stationed beside the law courts, surrounded by a wall of troops, the sun glinting off the steel of their helmets – and this in the Forum, the very heart of Rome. Cicero, taken aback by
the spectacle, lost his nerve. His speech was delivered, we are told by one source, ‘without his customary assurance’.
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Others claimed that he could barely stammer so much as a word. Milo was found guilty. He left that same week for exile in Marseille. Other ringleaders of the mob violence were similarly served. In the space of barely a month peace had been restored to Rome.

Even Cato had to acknowledge that Pompey had done well, though he did so with his customary gracelessness. When Pompey took him aside to thank him for his support, Cato sternly retorted that he had not been supporting Pompey, but Rome. ‘As for advice, he would happily give it in private, if asked, and if he were not asked, then he would give it anyway in public.’
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Disguised as a slap in the face as this offer was, Pompey accepted it gratefully. Even since his return from the East a decade before he had been waiting for such a moment. However begrudgingly, Cato had acknowledged his status as first citizen. At long last, Pompey appeared to have power and respect together.

No wonder that when Caesar, that same new year, having racked his brains to come up with a suitable bride for his partner, had finally proposed his own great-niece Octavia, Pompey had turned down the offer. He had not meant to signal the end of his friendship by this rebuff, merely that it could not be taken for granted. Now that he had been restored to respectability in the eyes of the senatorial establishment, there were bidders for his hand who could offer more than Caesar. Pompey had been eyeing up the daughters of the crème de la crème for a while. One in particular had caught his connoisseur’s eye. The death of young Publius Crassus at Carrhae had left his wife Cornelia a widow. Beautiful and cultivated, she also happened to be exquisitely well connected. The pedigree of her father, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nascia, was sonorously reflected in the roll-call of his names. The fact that Metellus Scipio himself was a vicious nonentity, pre-eminent at nothing save the staging of
pornographic floor shows, mattered not the slightest. What did matter was the fact that he was the head of the Metelli, closely related to any number of impressive patricians, and descended from the same Scipios who had defeated Hannibal and captured Carthage. Cornelia’s own delights were an added bonus. Taking a break from cleaning up the streets of Rome, Pompey decked himself out in wedding garlands. It was the fifth occasion on which he had done so. This time round he was twice the age of his new bride. He brushed aside all the predictable jeers. Married life suited him. Above all, it provided him with a salve for his grief over Julia. The happy couple were soon scandalously in love.

A man in the arms of a woman such as Cornelia could know himself to be in the very bosom of the aristocracy. It was a sweet fulfilment, made all the sweeter by the fact that Cato, the man who had pronounced Pompey unworthy of his niece’s hand, had himself once been jilted by Cornelia’s mother. Old rancours ran deep, and there was no love lost between Cato and Metellus Scipio. Even so, when Pompey pronounced that the state of emergency in Rome had been brought under control and invited his father-in-law to serve as consul with him for the remainder of 52
BC
, Cato could hardly object. After all, Pompey was behaving with impeccable regard for the constitution. The Republic had been sick, and now it was restored. All was just as it had been in the past.

Pompey’s fellow citizens were desperate to believe this. Even those who had long been suspicious of his ambitions now had their own reasons for acknowledging his pre-eminence. Haughty aristocrats who had seen what Pompey had been able to achieve on behalf of that grand pornographer Metellus Scipio had begun to moderate their disdain. Cato might still clap his hands over his ears whenever Pompey said anything unconstitutional, but in general, and for the first time, he was prepared to give his old opponent a hearing. And then, of course, there was Caesar. In Gaul, amid the blood and
smoke of Alesia, Pompey’s partner still looked to him for friendship. Many different interests, many of them irreconcilably opposed – and yet all of them looking for support to a single person.

This was unprecedented in the history of the Republic. No wonder that Cicero found himself marvelling at Pompey’s ‘abilities and good fortune, which have enabled him to achieve what nobody else has ever done’.
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Yet even as the great man exulted in his primacy, each faction competing for his favours was manoeuvring to destroy the others, and force Pompey to identify with them alone. Who was exploiting whom? This was a question that had barely begun to be resolved. Yet it would be soon enough – to the point of destruction and beyond.

The art of theatre-building did not come to an end with the construction of Pompey’s marble monster. If anything, it rose to new heights of rococo ingenuity, as ambitious noblemen competed to lay foundations not of stone but deep within the affections of the Roman people. Most extraordinary of all was a theatre built by Curio, the brilliant young intimate of Clodius. In 53
BC
Curio’s father had died. Curio had been in Asia at the time, on provincial duties, but even before his return to Rome he had begun drawing up plans for a series of truly spectacular funeral games. When the theatre that had been designed to stage them was finally unveiled, the audience found to their excitement that they too were to be a feature of the show. Two different stages had been built, complete with banks of seats, both precariously balanced on a revolving pivot. Two plays could be performed simultaneously, and then, at midday, when the acting was done, there would be an immense cranking of machinery, the theatres would revolve, lock together and form a
single stage. ‘This was where the gladiators would battle, even though the Roman people themselves, as they spun round in their seats, were in far greater peril than the gladiators.’ More than a century later the elder Pliny could only shake his head in astonishment at the design. ‘And yet that was not the most amazing thing!’ he exclaimed. ‘Even more incredible was the madness of the people. There they sat, perfectly content, in seats which were treacherous and liable to collapse!’
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Here, it might have been thought, in a city as sensitive to omens as Rome, was a wonder pregnant with menace. To later generations, the identification of the Republic with Curio’s amphitheatre – so splendid, so unstable – must have been an obvious one to make. Indeed, it is surely the reason why the memory of it was preserved. But if any of the spectators who risked their necks clambering into the stalls were aware of the portentous nature of what they were doing, then the record of it has failed to survive. The mood of the Republic was fretful, but not apocalyptic. Why would it have been otherwise? Rome’s system of government had endured for almost five hundred years. It had won her a greatness so surpassing that not a king in the world had been able to withstand her. Above all, it gave to every citizen the measurement of himself, the reassurance that he was not a subject or a slave, but a man. A Roman could no more conceive of the Republic’s collapse than he could imagine himself an Egyptian or a Gaul. Fearful of the gods’ anger he may have been, but not to the point of dreading the impossible.

So there was no one to read in the creaking of Curio’s theatre an approaching cataclysm. Just the opposite: to the voters, it ground out a familiar rhythm. Curio had his eye on a tribunate. His theatre was designed not only to honour his dead father, but to advance his ambitions. In that cause, as had become the fashion despite the tears over Pompey’s elephants, the blood of exotic animals had to be
spilled. Curio specialised in panthers, a taste he shared with Caelius, who was always badgering contacts in the provinces for more. Both men knew how important it was to cut a dash with the electorate. As Caesar had done before them, they gambled with their futures by running up monstrous debts. Once this might have branded them as lightweights. Now it marked them out as rising stars.

So too did other, more time-tested talents. The Republic still swirled as violently as it had ever done with ambitions, hatreds and intrigues, but Curio and Caelius were both skilled in negotiating such treacherous currents, knowing when to hold fast and when to tack to fresh winds. Principle rarely blinded them to personal advantage. Their own relationship was a case in point. Each could recognise a useful ally in the other, despite the fact that during the perilous days after Clodius’ murder, when the Republic had appeared on the verge of anarchy, they had been on opposite sides. Curio, Clodius’ oldest ally, had remained faithful to the memory of his dead friend, and indeed proved such a comfort to Clodius’ widow Fulvia that the two of them ended up marrying. Caelius, by contrast, had continued his feud with Clodia and her brother with implacable gusto, and in 52
BC
, when he was tribune, used the full resources of his office to serve as cheerleader for Milo. A year later, however, when Caelius found himself particularly short of panthers, Curio thought nothing of slipping him twenty of his own. As it had always been, bet-hedging remained a politician’s wisest course.