Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (9 page)

Next, however, came a more fateful step. Mithridates had to decide whether to take the attack to Rome herself. Superpowers were not taken on lightly, but war with the Republic was a challenge for which Mithridates had been preparing all his reign. Like any ambitious despot, he had worked hard to beef up his offensive capabilities, and his army was shiny new – literally so, since its weapons were embossed with gold and its armour with bright jewels. But if Mithridates liked to make a splash, he also enjoyed playing at cloak and dagger: travelling undercover through Asia, he
had seen enough to convince him of the provincials’ hatred of Rome. This, more than anything, was what persuaded him to take the plunge. Crossing into the province of Asia, he found the garrisons protecting it scanty and ill-prepared, and the Greek cities eager to hail him as a saviour. In a matter of weeks Roman power in the province had totally collapsed, and Mithridates found himself standing on the shore of the Aegean Sea.

As a matricidal barbarian he was hardly the kind of champion the Greeks would normally have taken to their hearts. But better a matricidal barbarian than the
publicani
– the longing for freedom was so desperate, and the loathing of Rome so visceral, that the provincials were willing to go to any lengths to dispose of their oppressors. In the summer of 88, when Rome’s chains had already been thrown off, they were to demonstrate this in a horrific explosion of violence. Aiming to bind the Greek cities to him irrevocably, Mithridates wrote to them, ordering the massacre of every Roman and Italian left in Asia. The Greeks followed his instructions with savage relish. The atrocity was all the more terrible for the secrecy with which it had been prepared and the perfect co-ordination of the attacks. Victims were rounded up and slaughtered by hired assassins, hacked to pieces as they clung to sacred statues, or shot as they attempted to escape into the sea. Their bodies were left to rot unburied outside city walls. Eighty thousand men, women and children were said to have been killed on that single, deadly night.
¹⁰

As a blow to the Roman economy, this was calculated and devastating; but as a blow to Roman prestige it was far worse. Mithridates had already shown himself a master of propaganda, resurrecting the Sibyl’s prophecies and throwing in some new ones of his own in order to make them appear more relevant to himself. The common theme was the appearance of a great king from the East, an instrument of divine retribution sent to humble
the arrogant and grasping superpower. The mass slaughter of businessmen was only one way in which Mithridates chose to dramatise this. Even more calculated for effect was the execution of Manius Aquillius, the Roman commissioner who had provoked Mithridates into war in the first place. Falling ill at just the wrong moment, the unfortunate Aquillius was captured and dragged back to Pergamum, shackled all the way to a seven-foot barbarian. After tying him to an ass and parading him through jeering crowds, Mithridates next ordered some treasure melted down. When all had been prepared, Aquillius’ head was jerked back, his mouth forced open, and the molten metal poured down his throat. ‘War-mongers against every nation, people and king under the sun, the Romans have only one abiding motive – greed, deep-seated, for empire and riches.’
¹¹
This had been the verdict of Mithridates on the Republic and now, in the person of her legate in Asia, he exacted symbolic justice. Manius Aquillius choked to death on gold.

When a ship loaded with the pickings of empire sailed for Italy, it would most likely aim for the bare cone of Vesuvius. Sailors would scan the horizon, searching for the familiar, flat-topped silhouette of the volcano, and when they made it out raise a prayer of thanks to the gods for having brought them safely through the perils of their voyage. Ahead of them was journey’s end. Across the glittering azure of the bay the sailors would see towns dotted along the coastline, picturesque touches of Greece on the Italian shore, planted there by colonists centuries earlier – for business, in the Bay of Naples, had always been international. Not that these old ports received much shipping now. Naples herself, for instance, basking in
the sun, made a living from a very different trade. Only two days’ ride from Rome, her ancient streets had recently begun to fill with tourists, all of them keen to taste the Greek lifestyle – whether by debating philosophy, complaining to doctors, or falling in love with a witty, well-read whore. Meanwhile, out to sea, the giant freight ships loomed and passed on by.

Nowadays, their port of call was a few miles up the coast. At Puteoli, Roman businessmen had long since flattened all traces of Greek heritage. Huge, concrete moles harboured shipping from all over the Mediterranean, loaded with grain to feed Rome’s monstrous appetite and slaves to fuel her enterprises, but also rarities garnered from her far-off domains: sculptures and spices, paintings and strange plants. Only the wealthiest could afford such luxuries, of course, but there was a growing market for them in the villas that now dotted the coastline either side of Puteoli, and were themselves the ultimate in consumer trophies. Like the super-rich anywhere, the Roman aristocracy wanted to keep their favourite holiday destination exclusive, and to this end had begun to buy it up.

The property boom in the region had been fuelled throughout the nineties by resourceful entrepreneurs – and in particular by an oyster-breeder named Sergius Orata. Looking to capitalise on the insatiable Roman appetite for shellfish, Orata had developed the local oyster beds on a hitherto undreamed-of scale. He had built channels and dams to regulate the flow of the sea, and lofty canopies over the mouth of the neighbouring Lucrine Lake, which he then promoted as home to the tastiest oysters in the world. Contemporaries were so impressed by Orata’s wizardry that they claimed he could have bred shellfish on his roof had he tried. But it was a further piece of technical innovation that really made Orata’s name: having cornered the market in oysters, he then invented the heated swimming pool.

Such at least seems the likeliest meaning of a cryptic Latin phrase,
balneae pensiles
– literally, hanging baths.
*
We are told that this invention required the suspension of seas of warm water and was marvellously relaxing, properties which helped Orata to market it as successfully as oysters. Soon enough, no property could be called complete unless it had first had a ‘hanging bath’ installed. Of course, it was Orata himself who did the installing – buying up villas, building the swimming pools, then selling the properties on.

It did not take long for his speculations to make the Bay of Naples synonymous with wealth and chic. Nor was the boom confined solely to the coast. Inland too, in ancient cities such as Capua, where the scent of perfume hung thick in the streets, or Nola, a favoured ally of Rome for more than two centuries, marks of peace and softness were all around. Beyond their walls, fields of apple-trees and vines, olive groves and wild flowers stretched away, back towards Vesuvius and the sea. This was Campania, the jewel of Italy, playground of the rich, fertile, prosperous and luxuriant.

But not everywhere was booming. Beyond Nola, valleys wound from the lowlands into a very different world. In Samnium all was mountainous and austere. Just as the jagged contours of the landscape provided a brutal contrast with the plain below, so too did the character of the people who had to scratch a living from the stony, scrub-clad soil. There were no oysters in Samnium, no heated swimming pools, only lumbering peasants with comical, rustic accents. They practised witchcraft, wore ugly rings of iron round their necks,
and – scandalously – permitted barbers to shave their pubic hair in public. The Romans, needless to say, regarded them with scorn.

All the same, they could never quite forget that these savages had been the last Italian people to contest the mastery of the peninsula with them. Barely ten miles from Nola, at a mountain pass known as the Caudine Forks, the Samnites had inflicted one of the most humiliating defeats in Roman history. In 321
BC
an entire army had been trapped in the defile and forced to surrender. Rather than slaughter their captives, the Samnites had elected to strip them to their tunics and drive them beneath a yoke formed of spears, while the victors, in their splendid armour, had stood and watched in triumph. By humiliating them in this manner, however, the Samnites had betrayed a fatal misunderstanding of their enemies. Peace was intolerable to the Romans unless they dictated it themselves. Despite the terms agreed and sworn to, they had soon found a way of breaking the treaty, and returned to the attack. Samnium had been duly conquered. Colonies were built on remote hilltops, roads driven over the valleys, the very ruggedness of the landscape tamed. To anyone lolling beside one of Orata’s swimming pools, the age when the Samnites would sally forth from the mountains to devastate Campania must have seemed very ancient history indeed.

But then suddenly, late in 91
BC
, the unbelievable happened. Long-held grudges, never entirely extinguished, flared back into flames. Warfare returned to the Samnite hills. The mountain-men armed themselves as though the long years of occupation had melted away. Pouring from their fastnesses, they did as their ancestors had always done, and swept into the plains. The Romans, unmindful of the storm about to break, had stationed only the barest military presence in Campania and were caught perilously short. All along the Bay of Naples, lately the scene of such indolence and peace, cities fell to the rebels like ripe fruit from a tree:
Surrentum, Stabiae and Herculaneum. But the biggest prize of all – by virtue of its strategic situation – lay further inland: Nola. After only the briefest of sieges the city was betrayed to the Samnites. The garrison was invited to join the rebel forces, but when its commander and the senior officers contemptuously refused, they were starved to death. The city itself was strengthened and provisioned. Soon enough Nola had become a mighty stronghold of the rebels’ cause.

That cause was not confined to the Samnites alone. The treachery that had delivered Nola into the hands of the rebels was far from an isolated incident: the town of Pompeii, for instance, only a few miles from Naples along the slope of Vesuvius, had been party to the rebellion from the very start. Elsewhere in Italy, tribes and cities whose previous campaigns against Rome belonged to an age of barely remembered legend had also taken up arms. The particular focus of the rebellion, however, lay along the line of the Apennines, in territory mountainous and backward like Samnium, where the peasants had long been brutalised by poverty. It was this which gave their eruption into the urbanised lowlands such a savage quality. When the rebels captured Asculum, the first city to fall to them, they slaughtered every Roman they could find. The wives of those who refused to join them had then been tortured and scalped.

The record of such atrocities might suggest nothing more than a vengeful and primitive barbarism. Yet the hatreds of the peasantry would have counted for nothing without the oligarchies who ruled the various Italian states having their own reasons for unleashing them. It had always been Roman practice to flatter and bribe the ruling classes of their allies – indeed, it was the success of this policy that had done more than anything else to ensure the Italians’ loyalty in the past. Increasingly, however, those with the crucial power to influence their communities – the wealthy, the
landed, the literate – had begun to find themselves alienated from Rome. Their resentments were many. The burden of military service in Rome’s wars fell disproportionately on their shoulders. They held an inferior status in Roman law. Perhaps most unsettlingly of all, however, their eyes had been opened to a world of opportunity and power undreamed of by their ancestors. The Italians had not only helped Rome to conquer her empire, but had contributed enthusiastically to exploiting it. Wherever Roman arms had led, there Italian businessmen had been sure to follow. In the provinces the Italian allies were guaranteed privileges virtually indistinguishable from those of full Roman citizens, and the wretched provincials certainly found it hard to tell the two classes apart, loathing them equally as ‘Romaioi’. Far from mollifying the Italians, however, the experience of living abroad as a master race seems only to have encouraged them in their determination to share in a similar status back in their native land. In an era when Roman power had grown so universal, it is hardly surprising that the limited privileges of self-determination that Rome had always granted Italian politicians should have come to seem very small beer. What was the right to determine a local boundary dispute or two compared to the mastery of the world?