Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (27 page)

While Pompey lorded it over the East the man he had replaced indulged himself with the most flamboyant sulk in history.

Lucullus had every reason to feel peeved. His enemies, not content with having had him dismissed from his command, continued to goad him on his return to Rome. Most vindictively of all, they blocked his triumph. In doing so they cheated him of the ultimate tribute that the Republic could pay to one of its own. Driven through the grateful streets, borne on the clamour of deafening applause and acclamation, a general on the day of his triumph became something more than a citizen, something more even than a man. Not only was he dressed in the gold and purple of a king, but his face was painted red like the holiest statue in Rome, that of Jupiter in the great temple on the Capitol. To partake of the divine was a glorious, intoxicating, perilous thing, and during the few brief hours when it was permitted a general became a spectacle of wonder and edification. To the Roman people who lined the streets to cheer him, he was living reassurance that ambition might indeed be sacred, that in struggling to reach the top, and to achieve great
things, a citizen was fulfilling his duty to the Republic and to the gods.

Few could doubt that the victor of Tigranocerta merited such an honour. Even Pompey, stripping Lucullus of his legions, had left him a few thousand men for his triumphal procession. Yet in the Republic there was nothing so awe inspiring that it was not also touched by the sordid day-to-day. Those who had profited from intrigue – as Lucullus had done when he had first won his pro-consulship – might expect to suffer from it too. These were the rules by which every politician played. The sniping of enemies was proportionate to the stature of a man. The prospect of what Lucullus might achieve as a civilian filled his opponents with fear, just as it inspired his allies with high hopes. Behind the scenes assorted grandees did what they could to reverse the opposition of the tribunes, and see that Lucullus was granted his triumph, but however genuine their outrage, and however loud their cries of scandal, they had their own selfish reasons for campaigning on his behalf. No friendship in Rome was ever entirely devoid of political calculation.

But Catulus and his supporters, who had been relying upon Lucullus to take his place as a leader of their cause, were to be disappointed. With humiliation following upon humiliation, something inside Lucullus appeared to have snapped. The man who had spent six gruelling years in pursuit of Mithridates was by now drained of enthusiasm for combat. He abandoned the political battlefield to others, and surrendered himself instead, with all the ostentation he could muster, to pleasure.

In the East, as a triumphant assertion of the Republic’s greatness, Lucullus had ripped apart the palaces and pleasure-gardens of Tigranes until not a trace of them had remained. Now, returned to Italy, he set about surpassing all the wonders he had destroyed. On a ridge beyond the city walls he built a park on a scale never before
witnessed in Rome, a riot of follies, fountains and exotic plants, many of them brought back from his sojourn in the East, including a souvenir from Pontus, most enduring of all his legacies to his homeland, the cherry tree. At Tusculum his summer villa was extended until it spread for miles. Most spectacularly of all, along the Bay of Naples, where Lucullus had no fewer than three villas, he built gilded terraces on piers, fantastical palaces shimmering above the sea. One of these same villas had belonged to Marius, the very estate to which the old general had refused to retire, dreaming of yet more campaigns, yet more triumphs. Lucullus, who had bought the villa for a record price from Sulla’s daughter, seemed determined to transform it and everything else he owned into monuments to the vanity of ambition. His extravagances were deliberately raised to be offensive to every ideal of the Republic. Once, he had lived by the virtues of his class. Now, retiring from public life, he trampled on them. It was as though, embittered by the loss of first power and then honour, Lucullus had turned his contempt upon the Republic itself.

In place of a triumph he instead flaunted his fabulous appetites. Sulla, to celebrate his victories, had feasted the whole of Rome, but Lucullus, with a greater expenditure of gold, positively revelled in private – and even solitary – excess. Once, when he dined alone and his steward provided him with a simple meal, he cried out in indignation, ‘But Lucullus is feasting Lucullus today!’
¹
The phrase was widely repeated, amid much shaking of heads, for nothing was more scandalous to the Romans than a reputation for enjoying
haute cuisine.
Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence. Back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook ‘had been the least valuable of slaves’, but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than ‘he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function
instead came to be regarded as high art’.
²
In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial. The Senate, alarmed, had accordingly attempted to restrain it. As early as 169 the serving of dormice at dinner parties had been banned, and later Sulla himself, in a fine show of hypocrisy, had rushed through similar laws in favour of cheap, homely fare. All mere dams of sand. Faddishness swept all before it. Increasingly, millionaires were tempted to join their cooks in the kitchens, trying out their own recipes, sampling ever more outlandish dishes. This was the crest of the wave that Sergius Orata had ridden to such lucrative effect, but oysters did not lack for rivals in the culinary stakes. Scallops, fatted hares, the vulvas of sows, all came suddenly and wildly into vogue, and all for the same reason: for in the softness of a flesh that threatened rapid putrescence yet still retained its succulence, the Roman food snob took an ecstatic joy.

Most treasured, most relished, most savoured of all were fish. So it had always been. The Romans had been stocking lakes with spawn for as long as their city had been standing. By the third century
BC
Rome had come to be ringed by ponds. Freshwater fish, however, because so much easier to catch, were far less prized than species found only in the sea – and as Roman gastronomy grew ever more exotic, so these became the focus of intensest desire. Rather than remain dependent upon tradesmen for their supply of turbot or eel, the super-rich began to construct salt-water ponds. Naturally, the prodigious expense required to maintain these only added to their appeal.

The extravagance of it all was justified by the ancient principle that a citizen should subsist off the produce of his land. Roman
nostalgia for the countryside cut across every social boundary. Even the most luxurious of villas also served as farms. Inevitably, among the urban elite, this tended to encourage a form of play-acting that Marie-Antoinette might have recognised. A favourite affectation was to build couches in a villa’s fruit store. A particularly shameless host, if he could not be bothered to grow and harvest his own fruit, might transport supplies from Rome then arrange them prettily in his store for the delectation of his guests. Pisciculture had a similarly unreal quality. Self-sufficiency in fish came at a staggering price. As agriculturalists were quick to point out, homemade lakes ‘are more appealing to the eye than to the purse, which they tend to empty rather than fill. They are expensive to build, expensive to stock, expensive to maintain.’
³
The claim that fish-breeding had anything to do with economy became increasingly impossible to justify. In 92
BC
a censor, no less, a magistrate elected to maintain the Republic’s stern ideals, had burst into tears at the death of a lamprey. He had grieved, it was reported, not for a ruined supper but ‘as though he had lost a daughter’.
⁴

Thirty years later the craze had reached epidemic proportions. Hortensius, rather than even contemplate eating one of his beloved mullets, would send to Puteoli if he ever needed fish for his table. As one of his friends commented wonderingly, ‘You would sooner get him to let you take his carriage-mules from his stable and keep them, than remove a bearded mullet from his fish-pond.’
⁵
In pisciculture, as in every other form of extravagance, however, it was Lucullus who set the most dazzling standards of notoriety. His fishponds were universally acknowledged to be wonders, and scandals, of the age. To keep them supplied with salt water, he had tunnels driven through mountains; and to regulate the cooling effect of the tides, groynes built far out into the sea. The talents that had once been devoted to the service of the Republic could not have been more spectacularly, or provocatively, squandered. ‘
Piscinarii
’, Cicero
called Lucullus and Hortensius – ‘fish fanciers’. It was a word coined half in contempt and half in despair.

For Cicero, with the acuity of a man who wanted desperately all that Lucullus was busy throwing away, could penetrate to the heart of the mania for fish-ponds. It spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome’s public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one’s ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man’s flight threatened the entire line of battle. Cicero, despite having seized Hortensius’ oratorical crown, had no wish to see his rival retire. The new man closely identified himself with the principles for which great aristocrats such as Hortensius and Lucullus had always stood. As he drew, step by careful step, ever closer to the supreme prize of the consulship, so it appalled him to see men he regarded as his natural allies sitting by their fish-ponds, feeding their bearded mullets by hand, leaving the Republic to twist in the wind.

But for Hortensius, as for Lucullus, the consciousness of having been bested, of holding only second place, was a burning agony. The orator’s retirement was not as total as the proconsul’s, but it was, in its own way, just as pointed. Increasingly, the law courts in which Hortensius had been so publicly routed by Cicero came to serve him as a stage for his eccentricities. A man who had brushed against his toga and damaged the arrangement of the folds was prosecuted for insulting behaviour. Just as flamboyantly, in the middle of a trial Hortensius moved for an adjournment, explaining that he wished to hurry back to his estate and supervise the irrigation of his plane trees with vintage wine. His opponent on this occasion, as on so many others, was Cicero. Wild extravagance was one arena in which the parvenu could hardly compete.

So it was that the ancient Roman yearning for glory turned pathological. Lucullus, splitting mountains for the benefit of his
fish, and Hortensius, serving peacocks for the first time at a banquet, were both still engaged in the old, familiar competition to be the best. But it was no longer the desire for honour that possessed them. Instead it was something very like self-disgust. Lucullus, we are told, squandered his money with every appearance of contempt, treating it as though it were something ‘captive and barbarian’, to be spilled like blood.
⁶
No wonder that his contemporaries were appalled and perplexed. Not properly understanding his condition, they explained it as madness. 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.

Self-indulgence did not have to be a stigma of defeat. What to great noblemen were the honeyed venoms of retirement might well to others promise opportunity. A few short miles down the coast from Lucullus’ villa at Naples stood the fabled beach resort of Baiae. Here, out into the glittering blue of the bay, stretched gilded pier after gilded pier, cramping the fish, as the humorists put it. To the Romans, Baiae was synonymous with luxury and wickedness. A holiday there was always a source of guilty pleasure. No statesman would ever willingly admit to spending time in a town so notorious, yet every season Rome would empty of the upper classes as
they headed south to its temptations. It was this that made Baiae such a hot spot for the upwardly mobile. Whether at its celebrated sulphur baths or over a dish of the local speciality, purple-shelled oysters, the resort offered precious entrées into high society. Baiae was a party town, and the strains of music and laughter were forever drifting through the warm midnight air, borne from villas, or the beach, or yachts out in the bay. No wonder that the place drove moralists apoplectic. Wherever wine flowed and clothes began to be loosened, traditional proprieties might start to slip too. A handsome social climber who had barely come of age might find himself talking on familiar terms to a consul. Deals might be struck, patronage secured. Charm and good looks might secure pernicious advantages. Baiae was a place ripe with scandal, dazzling in its aspect but forever shadowed by rumours of corruption: wine-drenched, perfume-soused, a playground for every kind of ambition and perversion, and – perhaps most shockingly of all – for the intrigues of powerful women.