Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (24 page)

Except that Mithridates himself, unyielding still in his defiance, had managed to slip through Lucullus’ fingers. A man with such an instinct for self-preservation that he had conditioned his body to tolerate poison was never going to accept defeat lightly. Instead, dodging every Roman attempt to capture him, he crossed the mountains to neighbouring Armenia, where he threw himself on the mercy of its powerful king, Tigranes. Lucullus promptly dispatched Appius to demand Mithridates’ surrender. This was the first official mission that Rome had sent to Armenia, a kingdom that had rarely disturbed the Republic’s calculations before, for it had always been remote from Rome’s sphere of influence, and its rise to prominence had been only a recent phenomenon. In little more than a decade Tigranes had established himself as the dominant power in what is now Iraq, adopting the grandiloquent title of the ‘King of Kings’ and all the gorgeous ritual of an Oriental court. Wherever he rode he was attended by four client kings, puffing as they ran to keep pace with his horse. Whenever he sat the same kings stood waiting beside his throne, ready to hop like slaves to their master’s bidding. Naturally, none of this flummery cut the slightest ice with Appius. When he met Tigranes he treated the King of Kings as the Claudii always treated everyone – with supercilious disdain. Tigranes, not used to being sneered at by anyone, still less by foreigners in their early twenties, was outraged. He refused to hand over Mithridates. The diplomatic chill further intensified when Appius, in defiance of all international niceties, turned his nose up at the gifts that Tigranes offered him and contemptuously accepted only a single cup.

So it was that Lucullus, without any official authorisation, found himself at war with a country of which few back in Rome had even heard. 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’.
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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.

But the destruction – and the profit – were not as total as they might have been. By the accepted rules of war, Lucullus would have been perfectly justified in enslaving the defeated population. Instead he set them free. Most had been forcibly transported to Tigranocerta, and by sending them back to their homes Lucullus aimed to foster separatist movements across Tigranes’ kingdom. It was a policy that combined shrewdness and humanity in equal measure. No Roman ever questioned that the defeated should pay for the privilege of being conquered, but Lucullus combined an eye for plunder with a strong sense of
noblesse oblige.
He certainly did not regard himself as an agent of slave-dealers or
publicani
, breeds for whom he had nothing but aristocratic contempt. Already, before setting out on the war against Tigranes, he had moved to deal with the blood-sucking that had disfigured Asia for so long. Interest rates
had been slashed. The more scandalous abuses of the moneylenders had been banned. Regulation had been rigorously imposed. As a result, the indemnities that had left the Greek cities of Asia mortgaged to the hilt had at last begun to be paid off. Within a bare four years they would all be cleared.

The ancient ideals of the aristocracy had always provided the Republic’s empire with its conscience, but in the figure of Lucullus the traditional paternalism of a senator combined with a radical new interpretation of Rome’s globalising mission. His passion for Greek culture enabled him to see clearly that Roman rule had no long-term future in the East unless the Greeks were given at least a stake in it. The clemency shown to the population of Tigranocerta had reflected a consistent policy. In Pontus Lucullus had not only spared Greek cities that held out against him, but paid for their restoration once they had been stormed. By refraining from their obliteration, he invested in their future and the empire’s own security and long-term health.

Naturally, this did nothing to quieten the howls of indignation back in Rome. Debt relief for provincials was not a popular policy with big business. For as long as his provincial record remained one of brilliant success, Lucullus was unassailable, but the storming of Tigranocerta marked the high point of his career, and from that moment on he became ever more vulnerable to attacks on his command. Breathtaking though his victory over Tigranes had been, he had failed in his primary objective: Mithridates remained on the loose. Throughout the following year of 68
BC
, Lucullus found himself on a wild-goose chase through the badlands of Armenia, harried by an enemy that now knew better than to meet him face to face. Increasingly, his triumphs seemed to be melting in his grasp. Back in Rome the financial lobby no longer had any qualms about unleashing their tame politicians on him. Various tribunes began to strip Lucullus of his provinces one by one, snapping at him like
wolves on the trail of a wounded beast. In Pontus the irrepressible Mithridates popped up with yet another army and won a series of quick victories over the Roman garrisons. Meanwhile, Lucullus himself was bogged down far away from the field of these disasters, in southern Armenia, vainly attempting to bring the war against Tigranes to a satisfactory close. The strategically important city of Nisibis was captured, and Lucullus prepared to hunker down there for the winter. But the gravest threat to his position no longer came from Tigranes. Instead, as he was soon to discover, it would emerge from within his own camp.

During that winter of 68 Lucullus was surrounded by soldiers who had been with him for six years. Subject to merciless discipline, paid the barest minimum required to keep them alive, they had been marched across mountains and over deserts, zigzagging backwards and forwards, for over a thousand miles. To many of them – and some had been serving in the East for almost two decades – home must have seemed the haziest of memories. Yet all dreamed of returning there. It was why they fought: not merely to test themselves, in the approved Roman manner, against the savagery of the enemy and the fear of a violent death, but to reclaim a status that poverty had caused them to lose. The regard of his fellow citizens was as much of an obsession for the outcast as it was for the rich. Only war enabled him to demonstrate what even the most snobbish acknowledged, that ‘there is no condition so base that it cannot be touched by the sweetness of glory’.
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And – of course – of loot.

The armies of the Republic had not always been filled with penniless volunteers. When the citizens assembled for elections on the Campus Martius, ranked strictly according to their wealth, they were preserving the memory of a time when men of every class had been drafted, when a legion had indeed embodied the Republic at war. Ironically, in those nostalgically remembered days, only those without property had been excluded from the levy. This had
reflected deeply held prejudices: among the Romans, it was received wisdom that ‘men who have their roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers’.
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The horny-handed peasant, tending to his small plot, was the object of much sentimental attachment and patriotic pride. Unsurprisingly, for the Republic had become great on his back. For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman-farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their ploughs left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years. During a soldier’s absence, his property might become easy prey. Small farms had been increasingly swallowed up by the rich. In place of a tapestry of fields and vineyards worked by free men, great stretches of Italy had been given over to vast estates, the ‘wilderness’ through which Spartacus had marched. Of course, it was not truly a wilderness, being filled with chain-gangs – but it lacked free-born citizens. The sight of ‘a countryside almost depopulated, with a virtual absence of free peasants or shepherds, and no one except for barbarian, imported slaves’,
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was what had shocked Tiberius Gracchus into launching his reform project. He had warned his fellow citizens that the foundations of their military greatness were being eroded. Every peasant who lost his farm had meant a soldier lost to Rome. To generations of reformers, the miseries of the dispossessed had seemed a portent of the entire Republic’s doom. The crisis in Italian agriculture was so overwhelming as to prove virtually intractable, but the crisis in military recruitment, at least, had begged an obvious reform. In 107 Marius had bowed to the inevitable: the army was opened to every citizen, regardless of whether he owned property or not. Weapons and armour had begun to be supplied by the state. The legions had turned professional.

From that moment on, possession of a farm was no longer the qualification for military service, but the reward. This was why, when the first mutterings of mutiny began to be heard in the winter of 68, the whispers were all of how Pompey’s veterans, merely for fighting rebels and slaves, were already ‘settled down with wives and children, in possession of fertile land’. Lucullus, by contrast, was starving his men of loot. The charge was patently untrue – Tigranocerta had fallen and been plundered only the previous year – but it was widely believed. After all, was Lucullus not notoriously mean? Had he not prevented the Greek cities back in Pontus from being looted? Were his men not ‘wasting their lives roaming across the world, with no reward for their service save the chance to guard the wagons and camels of Lucullus, and their freight of gold and gem-encrusted cups’?
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Discipline in the professionalised legions was even more merciless than it had been in the citizen levies of the past. Sentiments of mutiny were not lightly articulated. Fortunately for the resentful soldiery, however, there was a spokesman ready to hand. To Lucullus, his identity could not have come as more of a betrayal. The young Clodius Pulcher, unlike his elder brother Appius, had not been entrusted with flamboyant foreign missions. Nor had he been given the rapid promotion that he believed, as a Claudius, was his god-given right. Piqued by the perceived disrespect, Clodius had been waiting for the opportunity to stab his brother-in-law in the back. His revenge, when it came, was brazen. The patrician scion of Rome’s haughtiest family began to present himself as ‘the soldier’s friend’.
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His rabble-rousing had an immediate and devastating effect: Lucullus’ entire army went on strike.

Withdrawing their labour had always been the ultimate – indeed, the only – sanction available to disgruntled plebeians. In a camp on the very limits of civilisation, far from the frontiers of the empire, let alone from Rome herself, the primordial history of the
Republic was once again replayed. But the world in which the mutineers staged their strike was no longer that of their ancestors. Their own interests were almost the least of what was at stake. Not only was the mutiny hopelessly entangled with the snarl of aristocratic rivalries, but it was imperilling a vast swath of territories, containing millions of Rome’s subjects, and sending reverberations throughout the whole of the East. This was the potential greatness of a proconsul, that even in the hour of catastrophe the whole world might seem filled by the shadow-play of his downfall. As the legionaries sat on their weapons the news was brought to them that Mithridates had returned to Pontus and reclaimed his kingdom. And Lucullus, the aloof and haughty Lucullus, went from tent to tent, taking the hand of each soldier like a suppliant, and the tears streamed down his cheeks.

In the months following his soldiers’ strike, as Lucullus struggled to deal with Mithridates and mutineers simultaneously, a rare smile would have been brought to his face by the news that Clodius had been taken prisoner by pirates. ‘The soldier’s friend’ had been quick to abscond from Lucullus’ camp. Heading west, he had arrived in Cilicia, a Roman province on the south-eastern Turkish coast. Another of his brothers-in-law, Marcius Rex, the husband of Clodius’ youngest sister, was the governor there. Marcius, who disliked Lucullus and was perfectly happy to cock a snook at him, had rewarded the young mutineer with the command of a war fleet. It was while out on patrol with this that Clodius had been seized.

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. Clodius’ own dealings with pirates were to contribute less flatteringly to his reputation. When he wrote to the King of Egypt demanding the ransom fee, the response was a derisory payment of two talents, to the immense amusement of the pirates and the fury of the captive himself. The final circumstances of Clodius’ release were lost in a murk of scandal. His enemies – of whom there were many – claimed that the price had been his anal virginity.