Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (14 page)

But now Jupiter had decided to destroy his own temple with a thunderbolt. This was not a promising omen. It hardly required the Sibylline Books to reveal that – which was just as well, since they too were going up in the blaze. But what was the cause of the god’s anger? As the crowds gathered to watch the disaster, the flames billowed sparks and smoke across the Forum. This was
the heart of Rome, stretching all the way from the Capitol, hill of the gods, to the Palatine, hill of power. The Forum, along with the Circus, was one of two open spaces within the city walls where Rome’s citizens could mix freely. In recent years it had begun to grow pompous, cleared of market traders and lined with luxury shops, yet still, more than anywhere else in the city, it symbolised the unity of the Roman people. This had been the case since ancient times. Originally a marsh, it had been drained to provide a meeting-place for the warring inhabitants of the neighbouring hills. As such, it was where the Romans had first learned to conduct their affairs as citizens. Like the city itself, the Forum was a jumble of discordant monuments, both a museum of the Republic’s history and the hub of the city’s life. Lawyers pleaded their cases, bankers negotiated loans, Vestal Virgins tended their goddess’s flame, and everyone came to chat or be seen. It was politics, however, that dominated the Forum. The crowds watching the destruction of Jupiter’s temple would have been used to assembling at the foot of the Capitol. Here was the Comitium, where citizens gathered to hear orators address them from the Rostra, the curved speaker’s platform made from the prows of long-ago captured ships. Immediately adjacent to it was the Curia, where the Senate met, and a little to its south the temple of Castor and Pollux, in front of which the tribunes would summon assemblies to debate and vote on laws. Along this axis of buildings and open spaces lay the great theatre of the Republic’s political life, Rome’s most potent expression of her citizens’ liberties and values. All the more portentous, then, that as the fire on the Capitol raged, it would have dyed the Forum below it an angry red. Red: the colour of Mars, the god of war and bloodshed.

Sulla was later to claim that Bellona, Mars’ female equivalent, had given him advance warning of the catastrophe. Shortly after landing in Italy, one of his slaves had fallen into a prophetic trance,
revealing that unless victory were immediate, the Capitol would be destroyed by fire. Sulla’s superstitions did not prevent him from being a master of propaganda, and this story, no doubt assiduously repeated, neatly served to blacken his rivals’ cause. Certainly it would have reminded the public that Sulla, before his departure for Greece, had led the consul Cinna to the Capitol and there made him swear an oath not to attack him in his absence. Cinna had almost immediately gone back on his word. No wonder that the burning of the Capitol had come to Sulla as a godsend. From now on, as he plotted his reprisals, he could point to proof that the gods too wanted vengeance.

In fact, Cinna’s original oath-breaking had been as much an act of self-defence as treachery. In the brutalised political climate that Sulla had left behind, rivalries had continued to degenerate into ever greater violence. A dispute over that perennial bugbear, the Italians’ voting rights, had been sufficient to push the two consuls of 87 into open warfare. Cinna, expelled from Rome by Octavius, his colleague in the consulship, had promptly looked for ways to force a return. His first step had been to work some crowd-pleasing magic on the legion still camped at Nola, which as a result, for the second time in just over a year, had upped its siege and marched on Rome. But Cinna had conjured other allies too. The deadliest had brought not a legion but the magic of his name. After long months of exile in Africa, brooding amid the ruins of Carthage, Gaius Marius had returned.

Recruiting a personal army of slaves as he travelled through Italy, he had joined forces with Cinna, then turned on Rome. The city had fallen easily. Marius, psychotic with bitterness and rage, had launched a brutal purge of his enemies. Octavius, refusing to flee, had been hacked down where he sat in his consul’s chair, and his head brought to Cinna, who displayed it in triumph on the Rostra. Other opponents of Marius had either fled or been massacred with
conspicuous brutality. Meanwhile, with his gangs of slaves still rampaging through the city, the old man had finally been elected to his long-prophesied seventh consulship. No sooner had he taken up office, however, than he had abandoned himself to violent drinking bouts and nightmares. A fortnight later he was dead.

This had left Cinna as the regime’s undisputed leader. With a strongman’s contempt for precedent, he had maintained himself in the consulship for three consecutive years, preparing for Sulla’s return. Then in 84, with Sulla poised to invade Italy, Cinna had decided to pre-empt him and take the fight to Greece. This time, however, the consul’s army-camp rhetoric had let him down. His soldiers had mutinied and in the resulting disturbances Cinna himself had been murdered. Most Romans, dreading the arrival of Sulla’s battle-hardened legions, must have believed that, with Cinna gone, there would be one final chance for peace. Sulla, however, contemptuously rejecting the proposals put forward by neutrals in the Senate, had refused even to contemplate reconciliation. Despite the loss of Cinna, the Marians had maintained their iron grip on power, and both sides now braced themselves for a fight to the death. Marius’ own blood feud had passed to his son, a famously good-looking playboy whose lifestyle did nothing to diminish his filial loathing for his father’s greatest foe. As the temple of Jupiter blazed on the Capitol, the younger Marius hurried to the scene and rescued not the statue of the god, not the prophecies of the Sibyl, but the temple treasures that would enable him to pay for more legions. A few months later he was elected to the consulship of 82. He was only twenty-six.

By now, such cavalier abuse of the constitution had become the norm. Senators who had endured years of having their ambitions blocked by Cinna and his stooges could only fume in silence at the sight of such a young man strutting around the Forum with his bodyguard of lictors. Yet, unpopular though the Marians
undoubtedly were, the alternative hardly inspired much optimism. A sinister aura still clung to Sulla, the legacy of his own protracted record of violence. No great upsurge of support greeted his return. His claim to be restoring the Republic was treated with at best suspicion. Armies blocked the roads to Rome and failed to melt away.

All the same, Sulla was no longer the pariah among his peers that he had been during his first march on Rome, back in 88, when only a single officer had accompanied him. Five years on his entourage was thronged with noblemen. Many of these were pursuing personal vendettas against the Marians. Pre-eminent among them was a member of one of Rome’s most celebrated families, Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose father had led the opposition to Marius and been executed for his pains. In the resulting purge Crassus’ brother had also been killed and the family’s estates in Italy seized. These holdings would have been considerable: Crassus’ father had combined a glittering political career with a most unsenatorial interest in the import–export trade. Not for nothing was his family nicknamed ‘Rich’: Crassus would inherit from his father the recognition that wealth was the surest foundation of power. Later, he was to be notorious for claiming that until a man could afford to maintain his own army it was impossible for him to have too much money.
¹
This was a judgement founded on youthful experience. Fleeing his family’s killers, the young Crassus had travelled to Spain, where his father’s spell as governor had been immensely profitable. Even hiding out on a remote beach the fugitive had been able to live in style, with dependants delivering food and nubile slavegirls to his cave. Then, after several months of subsisting on such provisions, the news of Cinna’s death had encouraged Crassus to claim his patrimony in full. Despite being a private citizen, he had taken the unheard-of step of recruiting his own army, a huge force of some two and a half thousand men.
Crassus had then led it round the Mediterranean, sampling alliances with various other anti-Marian factions, before finally sailing for Greece and throwing in his lot with Sulla, who, unsurprisingly, had welcomed the new arrival with open arms.

The warmest welcome of all, however, was reserved for a warlord even younger and more glamorous than Crassus. Sulla had crossed to Italy and was advancing northwards when news was brought to him that another private army had been raised on his behalf and was marching south to meet him. Since the roads were blocked by a variety of Marian forces, Sulla was nervous that the reinforcements might be wiped out, but just as he was pressing forward to their rescue there came further news: the tyro general had won a series of brilliant victories; a consular army had been put to flight. Now the army was waiting for Sulla on the road ahead, drawn up in full formation, arms glittering, faces glowing with success. Sulla, as he was meant to be, was duly impressed. Approaching the tent of the novice general, he dismounted from his horse. A young man stood waiting, his golden hair swept up in a quiff, his profile posed to look like Alexander’s. He hailed Sulla as ‘
Imperator
’ – ‘General’ – and Sulla then greeted him as ‘
Imperator
’ in turn. This was an honour that it usually took even the most accomplished soldier many years to earn. Gnaeus Pompeius – ‘Pompey’ – was barely twenty-three.

Precocious swagger, a genius for self-promotion and an almost childlike relish for the perks of success: these were to be the defining characteristics of Pompey’s rise to glory. Sulla, who indulged his protégé’s vanity with an inscrutable cynicism, had his measure from the very start. He was perfectly content to flatter the young man if it helped to ensure his support. Pompey both merited and required courting. From his father, the perfidious Pompeius Strabo, he had inherited not only the largest private estate in Italy, but an aptitude for switching sides. Unlike Crassus, Pompey had no personal feud
with the Marian regime. Before Sulla’s arrival he had been spotted sniffing round Cinna’s camp. Evidently the spectacle of its collapse into mutiny had persuaded him that Sulla would be the better man to back. Pompey always had a nose for where the richest opportunities might lie.

What he and Crassus had both realised was that civil war transformed the rules of the political game. The most ruthless and clear sighted of the younger generation had been presented with an unparalleled opportunity to leapfrog their elders. Sulla, who regarded the younger Marius as his deadliest foe, commented ruefully that as he aged his enemies grew younger. So too did his supporters. Pompey, in particular, led his army with the insouciance of a schoolboy handed a toy. To the Romans, the passions of youth were violent and dangerous, and only discipline could tame them. Pompey, however, had been given his head. ‘
Adulescentulus carnifex
’, his enemies labelled him: ‘teenage butcher’.
²
Not having had to master either custom or law during his short career, Pompey could kill without respect for either.

One man could have reined him in, of course – yet the example provided by Sulla himself was of a savagery which put even that of the ‘teenage butcher’ in the shade. Deliberately, it seems, he provoked one final uprising from the Samnites, massacring them whenever he had the opportunity, as though to cast himself not as a warlord but as the defender of Rome. Once again Samnium and Campania were pillaged mercilessly, and once again, for the last time in history, the Samnites strapped on their gorgeous armour and high-crested helmets and marched down into the plains. They joined a Marian cause already on the point of collapse. By 83, after a year of civil war, one consul had already fled Italy for Africa, and the other, the younger Marius, was bottled up in the hill town of Praeneste, some twenty-five miles east of Rome. The Samnites, shadow-boxing with Sulla, first attempted to march to Marius’
relief, but then, with the sudden realisation that Rome lay unprotected in their rear, swung round abruptly and marched on the capital. Sulla, taken by surprise, pursued them at frantic speed. As the Samnites appeared within sight of Rome’s walls, their commander ordered them to wipe out the city. ‘Do you think that these wolves who have preyed so terribly upon the freedoms of Italy will ever vanish until the forest that shelters them has been destroyed?’
³
he cried. But even as the Samnites began to mass before the Colline Gate, the wails of women sounding in their ears from the terrified city beyond, Sulla was drawing near. Already by noon his vanguard of cavalry had begun to harass the enemy lines, and by late afternoon, against the advice of his lieutenants, Sulla was ready to throw his exhausted army into battle. All evening, and long into the night, the struggle ebbed and flowed. Crassus shattered the Samnite left wing, but Sulla found his own wing being broken and his troops in danger of being crushed against the city gates. Yet still his fortune held. Praying to the gods who had always been his protectors, he rallied his men and by dawn, when the news of Crassus’ success finally reached him, the victory was his.