Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

Certainly, there was none of Marius’ muscle-bound need to prove himself a man: no workouts on the Campus Martius for Sulla. When he retreated to his villa in Campania, he gloried in his retirement. He had restored the Republic, and the fruit of his work was peace. The crisis was over. Who could doubt, seeing Sulla in his Greek tunic, strolling with other tourists through the back streets of Naples, that the good times were back?

Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies, but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: ‘Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?’16 The generation that succeeded him would have to give their own answer to that question. In doing so they would serve to define how Sulla himself was best to be judged: had he been the saviour or destroyer of the constitution?

because Marius had married into the Julians, the heir of that ancient, patrician family found himself on the run. Only nineteen, a young man whose family connections should have ensured him seamless advancement, he had to hide out in mountain haylofts and offer frantic bribes to bounty-hunters. It was an experience he would never forget. In future years he would prove himself unusually determined to master the vagaries of Fortune. No less than Pompey, the young Julius Caesar emerged from the years of Sulla’s domination hardened before his time.

To the Romans, such a condition verged on the scandalous. Children were certainly too weak to be idealised, and the highest praise a child could be given was to be compared to an adult. The result is, to modern eyes at least, a curious and frustrating gap in ancient biographies. Never do the great figures of the Republic appear chillier or more remote from us than when their earliest years are being described. We are offered portraits of them as prodigies of physical toughness or learning – stiff, priggish, implausible. Anecdotes that portray them as children rather than as mini-adults are few and far between. The greater the figure, the less adequate the portrait of his childhood is likely to appear. The early years of a man such as Caesar are effectively a blank.

Caesar’s upbringing was famously strict, and his mother, Aurelia, was accordingly remembered by subsequent generations of Romans as a model parent; so model, in fact, that it was said she had breastfed her children. This, notoriously, was something that upper-class women rarely chose to do, despite it being their civic duty, since, as everyone knew, milk was imbued with the character of the woman who supplied it. How could a slave’s milk ever compare with that of a freeborn Roman woman?

The son who failed to equal the rank and achievements of his ancestors, the daughter who neglected to influence her husband in the interests of her father or her brothers – both brought public shame on their family. It was the responsibility of the pater familias to ensure that such a calamity never occurred. As a result, child-rearing, like virtually every other aspect of life in the Republic, reflected the inveterate Roman love of competition. To raise heirs successfully, to instil in them due pride in their blood-line and a hankering after glory, these were achievements worthy of a man.

84 Caesar’s father died – of what we are not told. In the same year Caesar himself set aside his bulla, draped his body in the heavy folds of a grown man’s toga and officially came of age. The consul Cinna, Rome’s strongman following Marius’ death, now moved fast. Caesar’s priesthood was officially confirmed. The sixteen-year-old must already have cut an impressive figure, because Cinna also offered him the hand of his daughter, Cornelia. Caesar was engaged at the time, but no young man was going to miss out on the chance of having the Republic’s supremo as his father-in-law. Marriage in Rome was a typically unsentimental business. Love was irrelevant, politics was all.

Marius’ nephew and Cinna’s son-in-law, Caesar was hardly likely to recommend himself to the new dictator. Even so, his name did not feature on the first proscription lists. Protégé of the Marians though he was, Caesar also had close links to Sulla. The multiform character of the Republic frequently bred contradictory loyalties. The world of the aristocracy, in particular, was a small one, and the complex web of marriage alliances could end up entangling even the bitterest rivals. Caesar’s mother came from a family who had provided Sulla with some of his most influential supporters. It was an association that was to save Caesar’s life.

Crowd-pleasers marked themselves out as populares. Marius had been one, Sulpicius too. Sulla’s entire political programme had been an attempt to scotch the popularis tradition – the tradition to which Caesar regarded himself as heir.

Already a war hero, seasoned in the practical politics of diplomacy and the provinces, Caesar was now also a public figure. He was not yet twenty-four.

the Republic sport was political and politics was a sport. Just as the skilled charioteer had to round the metae, the turning posts, lap after lap, knowing that a single error – a clipping of a meta with his wheel-hub, or an attempt to round it too fast – might send his vehicle careering out of control, so the ambitious nobleman had to risk his reputation in election after election. To the cheers and boos of spectators, charioteer and nobleman alike would make their drive for glory, knowing that the risk of failure was precisely what gave value to success. Then, once it was over, the finishing line breasted, or the consulship won, new contestants would step forward and the race would start again.

Instead, for the new man, the likeliest career path to triumph in the Cursus, to the ultimate glory of the consulship and to seeing himself and his descendants join the ranks of the elite, was the law. In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans no end to point out how ‘incredibly muddled – almost verging on the ridiculous – other legal systems are compared to our own!’16 In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squi...

Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke.

But as the seventies BC wore on Hortensius’ pre-eminence came increasingly under threat, not from a fellow member of the senatorial establishment, not even from a member of the nobility, but from a man who was an upstart in every way. Like Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero was a native of the small hill town of Arpinum – and, like Marius, he was filled with ambition.

Cicero, always a sucker for flattery, was delighted. ‘And so I came home after two years not only more experienced,’ he recalled later, ‘but almost a new person. The excessive straining on my throat had gone, my style was less frenetic, my lungs were stronger – and I had even put on weight.’

For those on the Cursus, exposure was all. A new man had to hype himself or else he was nothing. This was a lesson that Cicero would never forget.

Here was an argument that Cicero would cling to all his life: that his own success was to be regarded as the measure of the health of Rome. Genuine principle fused seamlessly with inordinate self-regard.

The news was broadcast all over Rome: the king had lost his crown; Hortensius’ rule of the law courts had been brought to a close. Cicero’s own supremacy was to last a lifetime. The advantages this brought him in terms of influence and contacts were immense. There were also more immediate spoils. At the start of his prosecution Cicero had claimed to have no concern with personal gain. This had been disingenuous in the extreme. As Cicero would well have known, a prosecutor had the right to claim the rank of any criminal he successfully brought to justice. Verres had been a praetor, and so, once he had been convicted, all the perks of his status passed directly to Cicero. Among these were the right to speak in debates ahead of non-praetorian senators. For a man of Cicero’s eloquence this was a crucial privilege. His oratory could now start to weave its magic not only in the law courts, but also in the very cockpit of politics.

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’.31 And what Marcus Crassus wanted was clear: to be the leading citizen in the state.

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.

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’.32 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.

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.

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,’34 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.

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?

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?’35 Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired.

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.

What had begun as a makeshift guerrilla force was now forming itself into a huge and disciplined army of some 120,000 men. Credit for this belonged to the leader of the original break-out, a Thracian named Spartacus.

This exploitation was what underpinned everything that was noblest about the Republic – its culture of citizenship, its passion for freedom, its dread of disgrace and shame. It was not merely that the leisure which enabled a citizen to devote himself to the Republic was dependent upon the forced labour of others. Slaves also satisfied a subtler, more baneful need. ‘Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else’:37 so every Roman took for granted. All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave. Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

Crassus, with one eye on the rebels and the other on the ever-nearing Pompey, followed him at a frantic speed, picking off stragglers in a series of escalating clashes. At last the rebels were cornered again, and Spartacus turned and prepared to fight. Ahead of his marshalled men, he stabbed his horse, spurning the possibility of further retreat, pledging himself to victory or death. Then the slaves advanced into battle. Spartacus himself led a desperate charge against Crassus’ headquarters, but was killed before he could reach it. The vast bulk of the rebels’ army perished alongside their general. The great slave uprising was over. Crassus had saved the Republic.

To most Romans, however, the war against Spartacus had been an embarrassment. Compared to Pompey’s achievement in slaughtering thousands of tribesmen in a far-off provincial war, Crassus’ rescue act in Rome’s backyard was something to forget. This is why, even though both men were voted laurel wreaths, Crassus had to be satisfied with a second-class parade, touring the streets of Rome not in a chariot but on foot. No pavement-pounding for Pompey, of course. Nothing but the best for the people’s hero. While Pompey, preening like a young Alexander, rode in a chariot pulled by four white horses, his trains of loot and prisoners snaking ahead of him through the streets, his adoring fans going wild, Crassus could only watch, and fume.

Nothing excited the crowds in an arena more than to see a duel between two gladiators armed with different weapons and skills. The most popular form of combat set a swordsman, magnificently armoured with breastplate and helmet, against a nimble-footed trident-carrier, whose aim was to entangle the swordsman in the meshes of a net. Pompey and Crassus provided a similar spectacle: two opponents so different, yet so evenly matched that neither could establish an advantage over the other. Rather than providing the Romans with entertainment, however, the duel shocked and disturbed them. Slaves might fight to the death, but not the consuls of the Roman people. A gladiator might slash the throat of a defeated opponent, but for one of the two heads of state to finish off his fellow was an affront to every ideal of the Republic. Ultimately, Pompey and Crassus seem to have realised that they were both being equally damaged by their feud. Towards the end of their year in office, as they were presiding at a public assembly in the Forum, a citizen suddenly interrupted them and asked for permission to relate a dream. It was granted. ‘Jupiter,’ the citizen announced, ‘appeared to me, and told me to announce in the Forum that the consuls should not lay down their office until they have become friends.’40 There was a long pause. Then Crassus crossed to Pompey and took his hand. He praised his rival. The two were reconciled.

Powerful as Pompey and Crassus both were, neither could afford to be seen as more powerful than the other. This was the lesson that the Republic, even as it instilled in its citizens the desire to be the best, still insisted upon. Achievement was worthy of praise and honour, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself.

The more distant and intractable the enemy, the greater the logistical demands upon the consuls. In extreme circumstances, this left the Senate with little choice but to appoint a magistrate who could take their place, who could be, as the Romans put it, ‘pro consule’.

The Republic was never so dangerous as when it believed that its security was at stake. The Romans rarely went to war, not even against the most negligible foe, without somehow first convincing themselves that their pre-emptive strikes were defensive in nature.

Despite the lateness of the season he acted with his customary decisiveness. Braving the floods of the Euphrates, he struck eastwards. His target was Tigranocerta, a city that the Armenian king had not only lovingly built from scratch, but honoured with his own royal name. At the news that his showpiece capital was under siege, Tigranes came storming to its relief. This was exactly what Lucullus had been banking on, despite the fact that he was now further from Rome than any Roman general in history, and that his legions were, as usual, vastly outnumbered. Tigranes himself, when he saw the pitiable size of the force opposed to him, joked that the Romans ‘were too many to be an embassy, and too few to be an army’.2 The royal quip provoked much sycophantic mirth, but the smile was soon to be wiped from Tigranes’ face. In one of the most stunning victories in the annals of the Republic, Lucullus not only annihilated the Armenian army, but stormed Tigranocerta and literally took it to pieces. With their customary brutal efficiency, the Romans stripped the city bare, Lucullus taking the royal treasures, his men everything else. Then the city was levelled. Tigranes, a fugitive within his own kingdom, was powerless to intercede. Of the splendid monuments and palaces that the King of Kings had so recently erected to his glory barely a brick was left.

Capture by pirates had recently become something of an occupational hazard for Roman aristocrats. Eight years previously Julius Caesar had been abducted while en route to Molon’s finishing school. When the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar had indignantly claimed that he was worth at least fifty. He had also warned his captors that he would capture and crucify them once he had been released, a promise that he had duly fulfilled.

‘The pirate is not bound by the rules of war, but is the common enemy of everyone,’ Cicero complained. ‘There can be no trusting him, no attempt to bind him with mutually agreed treaties.’9 How was such an adversary ever to be pinned down, still more eradicated? To make the attempt would be to fight against phantoms. ‘It would be an unprecedented war, fought without rules, in a fog’;10 a war that appeared without promise of an end.

Despite an impassioned appeal from Catulus not to appoint ‘a virtual monarch over the empire’,13 the citizens rapturously ratified the bill. Pompey was granted the unprecedented force of 500 ships and 120,000 men, together with the right to levy more, should he decide that they were needed. His command embraced the entire Mediterranean, covered all its islands, and extended fifty miles inland. Never before had the resources of the Republic been so concentrated in the hands of a single man.

But Pompey, greedy as ever, wanted more. It was not enough to be the new Hector. From his earliest days, teasing his quiff in front of the mirror, he had dreamed of being the new Alexander. Now he was determined to seize his chance. The East lay all before him, and with it the prospect of glory such as no Roman citizen had ever won before.

Pompey, intrigued by reports of the Jews’ peculiar god, brushed aside the protests of the scandalised priests and passed into the Temple’s innermost sanctum. He was perplexed to find it empty. There can be little doubt as to whom Pompey thought was more honoured by this encounter, Jehovah or himself. Not wishing to aggravate the Jews any further, he left the Temple its treasures, and Judaea a regime headed by a tame high priest. Pompey then marched south, aiming to strike across the desert for Petra, but he was never to reach the rose-red city. Midway he was halted by dramatic news: Mithridates was dead.

Ennui was an affliction unknown to the Republic. Not so to later generations. Seneca, writing in the reign of Nero, at a time when the ideals of the Republic had long since atrophied, when to be the best was to risk immediate execution, when all that was left to the nobility was to keep their heads down and tend to their pleasures, could distinguish the symptoms very well. ‘They began to seek dishes,’ he wrote of men such as Lucullus and Hortensius, ‘not to remove but to stimulate the appetite.’7 The fish-fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows darker than they understood.

Women had no choice but to exert their influence behind the scenes, by stealth, teasing and seducing those they wished to influence, luring them into what moralists were quick to denounce as a feminine world of gossip and sensuality. To the already ferociously nuanced world of male ambition, this added a perilous new complication. The qualities required to take advantage of it were precisely those that had always been most scorned in the Republic. Cicero, not one of life’s natural party animals, listed them in salacious detail: an aptitude for ‘debauchery’, ‘love affairs’, ‘staying up all night to the din of loud music’, ‘sleeping around’ and ‘spending cash to the point of ruin’.11 The final, clinching disgrace, and the ultimate mark of a dangerous reprobate, was to be a good dancer. In the eyes of traditionalists nothing could be more scandalous.

Cicero, who admired Cato deeply, could nevertheless bitch that ‘he addresses the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus’.

was noted by his shrewder enemies, however, that he never let his partying put his health at risk. His eating habits were as frugal as Cato’s. He rarely drank. If his sexual appetites were notorious, then he was careful to choose his long-term partners with a cool and searching caution. Cornelia, his wife, had died back in 69 BC and Caesar, looking for a new bride, had fixed his eye on Pompeia, the granddaughter of Sulla, no less. Throughout his career, Caesar was to prove himself keenly aware of the need for good intelligence, and this was as evident in his selection of mistresses as in his choice of a wife. The great love of his life was Servilia – who just happened to be the half-sister of Cato, and therefore the sister-in-law of Lucullus. Just for good measure, she was also Catulus’ cousin. Who knows what family confidences Servilia may have whispered into her lover’s ear?

Caesar, looking to break into the front rank of the Senate once and for all, and to colour his loose-belted image with a touch of more traditional prestige, chose to stake his entire career upon a single election. The post of Rome’s high priest, the pontifex maximus, had just become vacant. This was the most prestigious office in the Republic. The man elected to it held it until he died. Quite apart from the immense moral authority it bestowed, it also came with a mansion on the via Sacra, in the Forum. If Caesar became pontifex maximus, then he would be, literally, at the centre of Rome.

On the day that the result of the election was due to be announced he kissed Aurelia goodbye, then told her, ‘Mother, today you will either see me as high priest or I will be heading into exile.’19 As it proved, he would indeed be moving from the Subura – not into exile, but to his new mansion on the via Sacra. Caesar had pulled it off.

In 65 BC a rapacious spell as the governor of Africa had finally caught up with Catiline, when Clodius, back in Rome from the East, and eager to make a mark in the law courts, charged him with extortion. At the same time Cicero, the new man, was nerving himself for an attempt on the consulship. He knew that Catiline was planning to stand as well, and so briefly considered defending him in his forthcoming trial, hoping that the two of them might then run for office the following year on a joint ticket. Catiline, however, turned down the offer with a sneer of patrician contempt. The trial held few fears for him. Sure enough, he was speedily acquitted, possibly with the collusion of Clodius, almost certainly with the assistance of hefty bribes from Crassus. He was now free to run for the consulship of 63 BC. Catiline and Cicero would be going head to head.

At private meetings Catiline began to promise the poor that he would be their champion. After all, as he pointed out, ‘Who was best qualified to be the leader and standard-bearer of the desperate, if not a man who was bold and desperate himself ?’22

can see two bodies,’ he commented, not quite enigmatically enough, ‘one thin but with a large head, one huge, but headless. Is it really so terrible if I offer myself to the body which is lacking a head?’

The whole of Rome was engulfed by hysteria. Cicero was the hero of the hour. Yet a few dissenting voices could still be heard. The crisis had been manufactured, they whispered. Catiline had been right. It was Cicero who had pushed him into his revolt, Cicero and his vainglory, Cicero the upstart, greedy for fame.