Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (26 page)

One day in the spring of 66
BC
Lucullus watched a cloud of dust rise up on the horizon. Although he was camped by the side of a wood, the plain that stretched before him was parched and treeless. When he finally made out an endless line of troops emerging from the dust, he saw that the lictors of the commanding general had wreathed their rods in laurel, and that the leaves were dry. His own lictors rode out to greet the new arrivals, and in a gesture of welcome handed over fresh laurel. In exchange they were given the faded wreaths.

By such a sign did the gods confirm what everyone already knew. Since the mutiny the winter before Lucullus had found his authority withering by the day. Barely on speaking terms with his men, and certainly unable to trust them in combat, he had dragged his army in slow retreat back from Armenia. Licking his wounds in the uplands west of Pontus, he had been forced to watch helplessly
as Mithridates entrenched himself once again in his old kingdom. Yet this was not the worst agony. Lucullus’ replacement was the very man who had always most hankered after his proconsulship, and who had connived with the financiers and their tame tribunes to hack away at his command.

In the aftermath of the victory over the pirates there had been few prepared to stand in the way of Pompey the Great. The majority of the Senate, recognising a winner when they saw one, had abandoned their qualms and voted to award him further, and even more unprecedented, powers. Not only was he to command the largest force ever sent to the East, but he was given the right to make war and peace as he chose, on the spot. Lucullus, by contrast, had been left with nothing. Plenty of his erstwhile allies, including two former consuls and a raft of ancient names, had eagerly signed up to serve with the new proconsul. Lucullus, watching as his fresh laurel wreaths were handed over to Pompey’s lictors, would have recognised a host of impeccably aristocratic faces in his enemy’s train. Did they meet his gaze or, embarrassed, look away? Triumph, failure – both, to the Romans, provided an irresistible spectacle.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting between Lucullus and Pompey, conducted with chilly politeness at first, soon degenerated into a slanging match. Pompey jeered at Lucullus for his inability to finish off Mithridates. Lucullus retorted with a bitter description of his replacement as a carrion bird maddened by blood, only ever settling on the carcasses of wars fought by better men. The abuse turned so violent that the two generals finally had to be pulled apart, but it was Pompey who was the proconsul and could therefore land the killer-blow. He stripped Lucullus of his remaining legions, then continued on his way, leaving Lucullus to nurse his injured dignity, and depart, a private citizen again, on the long road back to Rome.

Even so, his insult had been the more wounding. Events were to confirm his boast that he had broken the backs of both Mithridates
and Tigranes, and in Pompey’s eagerness to fix on his prey there was indeed something of the scavenger smelling blood upon the wind. For the last time Mithridates was swept from his kingdom. As usual he vanished into the mountains, but even though he evaded his pursuers yet again, all he had left to menace them now was a phantom, his name. Tigranes, recognising overwhelming force when he saw it, and having no wish to take to the mountains himself, hurried to accommodate himself to Pompey’s dispensation. Arriving at the Roman camp, he was forced to dismount and hand over his sword. Proceeding on foot to where Pompey was waiting, he removed his royal diadem, then knelt in his gold and purple to grovel in the dust. Before he could prostrate himself, however, Pompey had taken his hands and raised him back up to his feet. Mildly, he invited the King to sit by his side. Then, in a polite tone, he began to set out the peace settlement. Armenia was to become a Roman dependency. Tigranes was to hand over his son as a hostage. In return he would be permitted to retain his throne, but not much else. The wretched King hurriedly assented to the terms. To celebrate, Pompey then invited Tigranes to his field tent to dine. This was the very model of a Roman general’s behaviour: after the ruthless assertion of the Republic’s might, the gracious gifting of scraps from the table.

Pompey’s genius for posing had found its perfect stage in the East. Acutely conscious that the eye of history was upon him, the great man rarely did anything without angling his profile towards it. As Alexander had done, he had even brought a tame historian with him, to chronicle every act of heroism, every magnanimous deed. He fought campaigns as he handled kings, with half an eye to providing sensational copy. It was not enough to thrash recalcitrant Orientals. He had to tangle with poisonous snakes, hunt after Amazons, push eastwards towards the great ocean that encircled the world. And all the while, uninhibited by finicky cavils from the
Senate, he could fuss with territories as though they were counters on a gaming board, rearranging them as he pleased, handing out crowns, abolishing thrones, the still-boyish master of the fate of millions.

Not that Pompey ever forgot that he was a magistrate of the Roman people. After all, a citizen was only as great as the glory he brought to the Republic. Pompey’s proudest boast would be that ‘he had found Asia on the rim of Rome’s possessions, and left it in the centre’.
¹⁵
His humbling of kings, his disposal of kingdoms, his far-flung campaigns at the edge of the world, all had this achievement as their strategic goal. When Pompey raised Tigranes from the dust, he did so as the stern protector of the Republic’s interests. The scene would otherwise have lacked its heroic glow. The flummery of kingship was all very well for impressing barbarians, but its only true value was to serve as a backdrop to the free-born virtues of Rome. No wonder that Pompey’s apeing of Alexander, however much it might provoke the contemptuous snorts of rivals like Crassus, was so relished by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. They could instinctively recognise it for what it was: not a display of impatience with the Republic, but, on the contrary, an affirmation of its superior dignity and worth.

For the memory of Alexander’s greatness had always served the Romans as a reproach. Even worse, it provided an inspiration to their foes. In the East the model of kingship established by Alexander had never lost its allure. For more than a century it had been neutered and systematically humiliated by Rome, yet it remained the only credible system of government that could be opposed to the republicanism of the new world conquerors. Hence its appeal to monarchs, such as Mithridates, who were not even Greek, and hence, most startling of all, its appeal to bandits and rebellious slaves. When the pirates had called themselves kings, and affected the gilded sails and purple awnings of monarchy, this had
not been mere vanity, but a deliberate act of propaganda, as public a statement as they could make of their opposition to the Republic. They knew that the message would be read correctly, for invariably, whenever the order of things had threatened to crack during the previous decades, rebellion had been signalled by a slave with a crown. Spartacus’ communism had been all the more unique for the fact that the leaders of previous slave revolts, virtually without exception, had aimed to raise thrones upon the corpses of their masters. Most, like the pirates, had merely adopted the trappings of monarchy, but there were some who had brought the fantastical worlds of romances to life, and claimed to be the long-lost sons of kings. This, in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean. The royal pretensions of slaves fed naturally into the swirling undercurrents of the troubled age, the prophecies, which Mithridates’ propaganda had exploited so brilliantly, of the coming of a universal king, of a new world monarchy, and the doom of Rome.

So when Pompey presented himself as the new Alexander, he was appropriating a dream shared by potentate and slave alike. If any Roman was qualified to appreciate this, it was Pompey himself. The conqueror of the pirates, and the patron of Posidonius, he would have been perfectly aware of the menacing links that existed between kingship and revolution, between the uppitiness of Oriental princelings and the resentments of the dispossessed. Having stamped out the threat of piracy, it was now his aim to stamp out similar threats wherever they smouldered throughout the East. One realm in particular appeared to invite his intervention. For decades Syria had served as a breeding ground for anarchy and violent visions of apocalypse. During the first great slave revolt against Roman rule, in Sicily back in 135, the leader of the revolt had even called his followers ‘Syrians’ and himself ‘Antiochus’, the latter a title filled with resonance. Kings of that name had once
ruled a great empire, a successor to that of Alexander himself, stretching at its height to the gates of India. Those glory days were long gone. Tolerated by the Republic precisely because it was weak, all that was left to the dynasty was its heartland of Syria. Even that, in 83, had been stolen by Tigranes, and it was only Lucullus, resuscitating what had appeared beyond all hope of resurrection, who had placed an Antiochus back on the Syrian throne. Pompey, glad of the chance to reverse anything that his predecessor had done, pointedly refused to recognise the new king. But personal spite, while it may have added relish to this decision, did not explain it. Antiochus was both too enfeebled and too dangerous to be permitted to survive. His kingdom was in chaos, a focal point for social revolution, while the glamour of his name continued to cast its hypnotic and subversive spell. If Syria were left as it was, a festering sore on the flank of Rome’s possessions, then there was the constant danger that its poison might infect a new Tigranes, a new generation of pirates or rebellious slaves. This, to Pompey, was intolerable. Accordingly, in the summer of 64, he occupied Antioch, the capital of Syria. Antiochus, the thirteenth king of that name to have held the throne, fled into the desert, where he was ignominiously murdered by an Arab chieftain. The wraith of his kingdom was dispatched to its grave at last.

In its place a new empire was rising. Rather than the Senate’s traditional isolationism, Pompey embodied a new doctrine. Wherever Roman business interests were threatened, the Republic would intervene – and, if need be, impose direct rule. What had once been a toehold in the East was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute. This, henceforward, was what the
pax Romana
was to mean. Pompey, who had won his proconsulship with the backing of the financial lobby, had no intention of repeating Lucullus’ error by
treading on its toes. But while he was happy to identify himself with its interests, he was also careful not to appear its tool. The age of unbridled exploitation was over. Bureaucracy was no longer to be uninhibitedly laissez-faire. In the long run, as even the business lobby had come to recognise, this was a policy that promised just as many pickings as before. It was certainly in no one’s interest to kill off geese that were laying such splendid golden eggs.

The great achievement of Pompey’s proconsulship was to demonstrate that the concerns of business could truly be squared with the ideals of the senatorial elite. It established a blueprint for Roman rule that was to endure for centuries. It also, not coincidentally, raised Pompey himself to a pinnacle of glory and wealth. The client-rulers who swelled the train of Rome also swelled his own. In the autumn of 64 Pompey headed south from Antioch to bag a few more. His first target was the fractious kingdom of Judaea. Jerusalem was occupied. The Temple, despite desperate resistance, was stormed. 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. The old king had never given up on his defiance, but when even his son turned against him and blockaded him in his chambers, Rome’s arch-enemy had been cornered at last. After vainly attempting to poison himself he had finally been dispatched by one of the few things to which he had not cultivated an immunity, the sword point of a loyal guard. Back in Rome the news was greeted with ten days of public thanksgiving.
Pompey himself, after announcing the news to his cheering legions, sped back to Pontus, where Mithridates’ body had been brought by his son. Not caring to inspect the corpse, Pompey contented himself with rifling through the dead king’s belongings. Among them he found a red cloak that had once belonged to Alexander. Looking ahead to his triumph, he promptly tried it on for size.

Few would have denied that it was his by right. His achievements stood comparison with any in the history of Rome. Yet as the great man prepared to head for home at last, the East finally pacified, his immense task done, there were few of his fellow citizens who did not find themselves unsettled by the prospect of his return. His wealth was beyond the dreams of avarice – even of Crassus himself. His glory was so dazzling as to blot out every rival. Could a Roman become the new Alexander while also remaining a citizen? In the last resort only Pompey himself could answer this question – but there were plenty, as they waited for him, prepared to fear the worst. Much had happened in Rome during Pompey’s five-year absence. Once again, the Republic had found itself in the grip of crisis. Only time would tell whether Pompey’s homecoming would help resolve it, or lead to a crisis greater still.