Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (23 page)

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.

The episode sounds suspiciously like a put-up job, but that makes it no less significant. A decade after Sulla’s death, the idea
that anyone might repeat what he had done, and establish a primacy over the state, still filled the Romans with horror. 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.

To the Romans, it was the intoxicating quality of power that made it so dangerous. To command the affairs of one’s fellow citizens and to lead them into war, these were awesome responsibilities, capable of turning anybody’s head. After all, what else had the Republic been founded upon if not this single great perception – that the taste of kingly authority was addictive and corrupting? Except, of course, that with Rome now the mistress of the world and the arbiter of nations, the authority of her consuls far exceeded any king’s. All the more reason, then, to insist on the checks that had always hedged about their office.

And yet – the growing extent of the Republic’s reach confronted the Romans with a dilemma. Now that they were the citizens not of a small city state but of a superpower, the demands on their attention appeared limitless. Wars flared up everywhere. 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
’. As
the Republic’s empire expanded throughout the second century
BC
so recourse to proconsuls had become ever more common. By the nature of their duties, they might find themselves campaigning for a period far longer than the conventional single year. Pompey, for instance, had spent five years in Spain. The war was duly won, but not without raising conservative hackles back in Rome. Pompey’s grandstanding only confirmed the Senate in its distaste for extravagant commissions of proconsular power. The situation in Spain had been desperate, but elsewhere, if Rome’s interests were not immediately threatened, then senators might prefer to tolerate any amount of low-level anarchy rather than grant one of their peers a licence to clear it up.

Such was the situation with the province of Asia. There, the war against Mithridates had left a legacy of misery and chaos. The cities groaned under punitive exactions; the social fabric was nearing collapse; along the frontier, petty princelings snarled and snapped. Over the wounds of the ruined province Roman flies buzzed eagerly, not only ambitious young officers like Julius Caesar, but also the agents of the
publicani
, ruined by Mithridates, now drawn back by the scent of fresh blood. Despite everything, Asia remained Rome’s richest province – and this was precisely what prevented the Senate from imposing an equitable settlement on the region. Who could be trusted to administer it? No one had forgotten the last proconsul appointed to deal with trouble in the East. Even over his own supporters, Sulla cast a warning shadow.

All the same, everyone in Rome was aware that the war against Mithridates was a job left unfinished. Eager to return to Italy and win the civil war, Sulla had consciously forfeited the Republic’s right to full vengeance: his decision to spare the butcher of eighty thousand Italians when he could have destroyed him had been an act of pure expediency. It particularly rankled with those who felt themselves to have been implicated in the policy. This was why the
officers left behind by Sulla continued to launch periodic raiding missions against Mithridates, trying to provoke him into a response. It was also why the senatorial establishment, led by those arch-Sullans Catulus and Hortensius, refused to ratify the peace treaty that their own generalissimo had signed. When Mithridates’ envoys travelled to Rome they were fobbed off with the excuse that the Senate did not have the time to see them. For month after month the ambassadors were left to stew.

All of which left Mithridates in no doubt that the Romans wished to see him toppled. Not that he had ever given up on his own ambitions. Asia appeared as full of rich pickings as it always had. Away from the prying eyes of Roman observers, Mithridates was slowly rebuilding his offensive capability, which had been shattered by the sanctions imposed by Sulla. This time round he looked abroad, to his enemy, for inspiration. Jewelled armour and gilded weapons were out, Roman-style discipline and efficiency were in. Mithridates began to arm his infantry with the
gladius
, the short, double-edged Spanish sword that the legionaries had adopted a century or so before. The savage injuries inflicted by this weapon, used as it was to stab and strike at the vital organs, had always provoked a particular horror in the East. Now Mithridates aimed to make it his own.

To this end, in the summer of 74
BC
he approached the Marian rebels in Spain and secured their assistance in equipping and training his army. The news, when it leaked out, caused outrage and horror in Rome. 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. Mithridates, of course, was no negligible foe. Asia once again seemed at genuine risk. Such was the groundswell of outrage that the authorisation of an Eastern command at last
became inevitable. But still the perilous question had to be answered: to whom?

In 74 the Sullan establishment retained sufficient control over the Senate to veto anyone too potentially overweening. This ruled out Pompey, who at this stage was in any case still embroiled in Spain, and Crassus, preoccupied as he was with his campaign for the praetorship. Fortunately for Catulus and his allies, one of their own was serving as consul that year. Lucius Lucullus was the most able and impressive of all the great noblemen who had attached their stars to the dictator and his settlement. His career, however, had been tumultuous from the start. He came from an ancient family chiefly celebrated for bad marriages and feuds. His mother had been insatiably unfaithful, and his father had indulged in a series of vendettas that had culminated in his prosecution and exile. Lucullus had inherited the blood-feud, and first made a name for himself by taking to court the man who had convicted his father. Such implacability was to prove an enduring feature of his character. It could translate all too easily into stiffness, for Lucullus was not blessed with the common touch, and rather than attempt to buy popularity, he was grimly content to be regarded as aloof and stingy. But he was also a humane and highly cultivated man, a philosopher and historian, steeped in Greek culture and possessing a genuine concern for the well-being of Rome’s subjects. Inveterate in his hatreds, he was also passionate in his loyalties and beliefs. He was particularly devoted to Sulla and his memory. It was almost certainly Lucullus who had been the one officer prepared to accompany Sulla on his first march on Rome. During the war against Mithridates he had balanced his duty to his general’s commands and his desire to protect the wretched Greeks with integrity and skill. Subsequently, he was the dedicatee of the dictator’s memoirs, the executor of his will and the guardian of his children. Unlike Pompey or Crassus, Lucullus could be trusted to stay true to his dead friend.

The Sullan establishment was therefore quick to mobilise in his support. Other powerful factions also moved to back him. Just before winning the consulship, Lucullus had married into the very grandest of Rome’s patrician dynasties. The Claudii were notorious for their arrogance and waywardness, but they could also boast half a millennium of high achievement, a record of consistency without parallel in the Republic. No family had more portrait-masks in its hall, or more hereditary clients, or more fingers in lucrative foreign pies. The prestige of the Claudii was such that it could transform even an aristocrat of Lucullus’ pedigree into a frantic social climber. So eager had he been to make a Claudian match that he had even agreed to forgo a dowry. His wife, in the best tradition of Lucullan brides, had soon proved herself fabulously unfaithful, but Lucullus must have calculated that she was a price worth paying to have the Claudii on his side. Not that his in-laws were any less hard-headed in their own calculations. The head of the family, Appius Claudius Pulcher, had only recently inherited that position on the death of his father, and had two brothers and three sisters to provide for, as well as his own ambitions. Sublimely imperious and opportunistic as he was, Appius could recognise that Lucullus was his likeliest ticket to a glamorous career in the East. The baby of the family, Publius Clodius, also had military aspirations. He had just turned eighteen, the traditional age for a young Roman to start his service as a soldier. Clodius, like Appius, had his eyes fixed on the glory trail.

Before they and their brother-in-law could set out for Asia, however, Lucullus still had to be confirmed in his command. Even with the backing of both Catulus and the Claudii, he found that a majority of senators remained against him. Desperate, he realised that there was no alternative but to put out the feelers to the Senate’s arch-fixer, Publius Cethegus. Too proud to do so directly, Lucullus opted for the lesser evil of seducing Cethegus’ mistress, and persuading her to bring her lover on board. The ploy worked:
Cethegus began to spin and strongarm in Lucullus’ favour. His bloc of tame senators was brought into play and the deadlock was broken. Lucullus was finally given his command.

With him went his consular colleague Marcus Cotta. This was either a compliment to Mithridates’ fearsome reputation or, more likely, a sign that the Senate could still not quite bring itself to entrust the war to a single man. Whatever the reason for it, the arrangement rapidly backfired. While Lucullus prepared to invade Pontus, Cotta managed to lose an entire fleet to Mithridates, then narrowly avoided losing his army as well, and ended up ignominiously blockaded in a port on the Bosphorus. Mithridates was now within striking distance of the province of Asia. To the indignation of his men, Lucullus loyally aborted his own invasion and swung back to the rescue of his incompetent colleague. At the news of his approach, Mithridates raised the siege, not to retreat but to launch a full-blown invasion of Asia itself. He had every reason to feel confident: his new model army had already put paid to one consul and it outnumbered Lucullus’ five legions by almost four to one. Mithridates must have thought that he had every chance of once again sweeping the Romans into the sea.

Lucullus, however, refused to take the bait. Instead of staking all on a frontal engagement, he harried the Pontic army, cutting off its food supplies, ‘making its stomach the theatre of war’.
¹
With the coming of winter, Mithridates was forced to retreat, leaving behind him the wreckage of his siege engines and thousands of his men. Then, in the spring of the following year, Lucullus struck again. This time he was able to launch his invasion of Pontus undistracted by events in his rear. Over the next two years he systematically destroyed Mithridates’ grip on power. By 71
BC
virtually the whole of the kingdom was in Lucullus’ hands, and a new province stood ready to be absorbed into the Romans’ empire. The war against Mithridates appeared to have been brought to a triumphant close.