Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (28 page)

The queen of Baiae, and the embodiment of its exclusive, if faintly sleazy, allure, was the eldest of the three Claudian sisters, Clodia Metelli. Her eyes, dark and glittering, had the ox-like appearance that invariably made Roman men go weak at the knees, while her slang set trends for an entire generation. The very name she adopted, a vulgar contraction of the aristocratic ‘Claudia’, reflected a taste for the plebeian that would influence her youngest brother to spectacular effect.
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To affect a lower-class accent had long been a mark of the
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politician – Sulla’s enemy Sulpicius, for instance, had been notorious for it – but now, with Clodia, plebeian vowels became the height of fashion.

Naturally, in a society as aristocratic as that of the Republic, it required blue blood to make a trend out of slumming – Clodia, by virtue of marriage as well as breeding, stood at the heart of the Roman establishment. Her husband, Metellus Celer, came from
the only family capable of rivalling the prestige and arrogance of the Claudii themselves. Fabulously fecund, the Metelli cropped up everywhere, often on opposing sides. So it was, for instance, that while one of the Metelli loathed Pompey so passionately that he had come within a whisker of attacking the proconsul with a full war fleet, Clodia’s husband spent much of the sixties
BC
on active service as one of Pompey’s legates. The great lady herself no doubt endured this separation with equanimity. Her primary loyalty was to her own clan. The Claudii, in contrast to the Metelli, had always been famously close; in the case of Clodius and his three sisters, notoriously so.

It was Lucullus, embittered and determined on the ruin of his in-laws, who had first made the rumours of incest public. On his return from the East he had openly accused his wife of sleeping with her brother and divorced her. Clodius’ eldest and dearest sister, who had let him into her bed when he had been a small boy, nervous of night-time fears, inevitably found her own name blackened by such a charge as well. In Rome censoriousness was the mirror-image of a drooling appetite for lurid fantasy. Just as it endlessly thrilled Caesar’s contemporaries to think of him as the bed partner of the King of Bithynia, so the pleasure that Clodius’ enemies took in the accusations of incest against him never staled. No smoke without fire – and there must have been something unusual about Clodius’ relations with his three sisters to have set tongues wagging. Throughout his career, he was to display a taste for pushing experience to the edge, and so it is perfectly possible that the gossip-mongers knew what they were talking about. Just as plausibly, however, the rumours could have been fuelled by the uses to which Clodia put her status as a society beauty. ‘In the dining room a cock-teaser, in the bedroom an iceblock’:
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this gallant description of her by a former lover suggests the care with which she exploited her sexual appeal. For any woman, even one of Clodia’s
rank, dabbling in politics was a high-wire act. Roman morality did not look kindly on female forwardness. Frigidity was the ultimate marital ideal. It was taken for granted, for instance, that ‘a matron has no need of lascivious squirmings’
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– anything more than a rigid, dignified immobility was regarded as the mark of a prostitute. Likewise, a woman whose conversation was witty and free laid herself open to an identical charge. If she then compounded her offences by engaging in political intrigue, she could hardly be regarded as anything other than a monster of depravity. Seen in such a light, the charges of incest against Clodia were hardly surprising. Indeed, they marked her out as a player in the political game.

Misogyny alone, however, savage and unrelenting though it was, does not entirely explain the vehemence of the abuse that society hostesses such as Clodia provoked. Women had no choice but to exert their influence behind the scenes, by stealth, teasing and seducing those they wished to influence, luring them into what moralists were quick to denounce as a feminine world of gossip and sensuality. To the already ferociously nuanced world of male ambition, this added a perilous new complication. The qualities required to take advantage of it were precisely those that had always been most scorned in the Republic. Cicero, not one of life’s natural party animals, listed them in salacious detail: an aptitude for ‘debauchery’, ‘love affairs’, ‘staying up all night to the din of loud music’, ‘sleeping around’ and ‘spending cash to the point of ruin’.
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The final, clinching disgrace, and the ultimate mark of a dangerous reprobate, was to be a good dancer. In the eyes of traditionalists nothing could be more scandalous. A city that indulged a dance culture was one on the point of catastrophe. Cicero could even claim, with a perfectly straight face, that it had been the ruin of Greece. ‘Back in the old days,’ he thundered, ‘the Greeks used to stamp down on that kind of thing. They recognised the potential
deadliness of the plague, how it would gradually rot the minds of its citizens with pernicious manias and ideas, and then, all at once, bring about a city’s total collapse.’
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By the standards of that diagnosis, Rome was in peril indeed. To the party set, the mark of a good night out, and the city’s cutting-edge craze, was to become ecstatically drunk and then, to the accompaniment of ‘shouts and screams, the whooping of girls and deafening music’,
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to strip naked and dance wildly on tables.

Roman politicians had always been divided more by style than by issues of policy. The increasing extravagance of Rome’s party scene served to polarise them even further. Clearly, it was an excruciating embarrassment for traditionalists that so many of their standard-bearers had themselves succumbed to the temptations of luxury: men such as Lucullus and Hortensius were ill-placed to wag the finger at anyone. Even so, the ancient frugalities of the Republic still endured. Indeed, for a new generation of senators, the backdrop of modish excess made them appear more, not less, inspiring. Even as it wallowed in gold, the Senate remained an instinctively conservative body, reluctant to glimpse a true reflection of itself, preferring to imagine itself a model of rectitude still. Politicians able to convince their fellow senators that this was more than just a fantasy might accrue considerable prestige. Sternness and austerity continued to play well.

It is hard otherwise to explain the remarkable authority of a man who in the mid-sixties
BC
had only just turned thirty, and held no office higher than the quaestorship. At an age when most senators would sit in respectful silence to listen to their seniors, Marcus Porcius Cato had a voice that boomed out across the Senate House floor. Rough and unadorned, it appeared to sound directly from the rugged, virtuous days of the earliest Republic. As an officer, Cato had ‘shared in everything he ordered his men to do. He wore what they wore, ate what they ate, marched as they marched.’
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As a civilian, he
made a fashion out of despising fashion, wearing black because the party set all sported purple, walking everywhere, whether in blazing sunshine or icy rain, despising every form of luxury, sometimes not even bothering to put on his shoes. If there was more than a hint of affectation about this, then it was also the expression of a profoundly held moral purpose, an incorruptibility and inner strength that the Romans still longed to identify with themselves, but had rather assumed were confined to the history books. To Cato, however, the inheritance of the past was something infinitely sacred. Duty and service to his fellow citizens were all. Only after he had fully studied the responsibilities of the quaestorship had he been prepared to put himself up for election. Once in office, such was his probity and diligence that it was said he ‘made the quaestorship as worthy of honour as a consulship’.
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Plagued by a sense of its own corruption as it was, the Senate was not yet so degenerate that it could fail to be impressed by such a man.

To the grandees of the previous generation in particular, Cato served as an inspiration. They were quick to see in him the future of the Republic. Lucullus, for instance, eager to hand on his torch to a successor, chose to celebrate his divorce by marrying Cato’s half-sister. His new bride was an improvement on the old one only in the sense that her affairs were not incestuous, but the unfortunate Lucullus, once again saddled with a party girl for a wife, forbore for years to divorce her, out of respect for Cato. This did not mean that Cato himself was prepared to extend any special favours to his brother-in-law; far from it. If he believed that the good of the Republic was at stake, he would prosecute Lucullus’ friends, and indeed take on anyone whom he believed required a lesson in virtue. On occasions he even went so far as to lecture Catulus. Cato was not prepared to take part in the intrigues that everyone else took for granted, a display of inflexibility that would often baffle and infuriate his allies. Cicero, who admired Cato deeply, could nevertheless
bitch that ‘he addresses the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus’.
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Such criticism seriously underestimated Cato’s political acumen. Indeed, in many ways his strategy was the polar opposite of Cicero’s, who had made an entire career out of testing the limits of compromise. Cato moved to the rhythms of no one’s principles but his own. Drawing his strength from the most austere traditions of the Republic, he fashioned himself into a living reproach to the frivolities of his age.

It was a deliberate tactic on Cato’s part to make his enemies, in comparison to his own imposing example, appear all the more vicious and effeminate. Chasing after women and staying out drunk were not expressions of machismo to the Romans; the very opposite, in fact. Indulgence threatened potency. Gladiators, in the week before a fight, might need to have their foreskins fitted with metal bolts to infibulate them, but citizens were supposed to rely on self-control. To surrender to sensuality was to cease to be a man. Just as domineering women such as Clodia might be portrayed as vampires, ‘sapping’
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the appetites of those who succumbed to their charms, so gilded rakes like Clodius were savaged as creatures less than women. With unwearying relish, the same charge was repeated time and again.

Yet for all that this abuse reflected deeply held prejudices, there was something nervy and shrill about it. No Roman ever bothered striking at an enemy he did not fear. The signs of effeminacy were also the signs of knowingness, of superiority, of savoir faire. Fashion served the function it has always done: of distinguishing those who followed it from the common herd. In a society as competitive as the Republic this gave it an obvious and immediate appeal. Rome was filled with ambitious young men, all of them desperate for marks of public status. To be a member of the smart set was to sport precisely such marks. So it was that fashion victims would adopt secret signals, mysterious gestures such as the scratching of the
head with a single finger. They grew goatees; their tunics flowed to the ankles and wrists; their togas had the texture and transparency of veils and they wore them, in a much-repeated phrase, ‘loosely belted’.
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This, of course, was precisely how Julius Caesar had dressed in the previous decade. It is a revealing correspondence. In the sixties as in the seventies, Caesar continued to blaze a trail as the most fashionable man in Rome. He spent money as he wore his toga, with a nonchalant flamboyance. His most dandyish stunt was to commission a villa in the countryside and then, the moment it had been built, tear it down for not measuring up to his exacting standards. Extravagance such as this led many of his rivals to despise him. Yet Caesar was laying down stakes in a high-risk game. To be the darling of the smart set was no idle thing. The risk, of course, was that it might result in ruin – not merely financial, but political too. It was noted by his shrewder enemies, however, that he never let his partying put his health at risk. His eating habits were as frugal as Cato’s. He rarely drank. If his sexual appetites were notorious, then he was careful to choose his long-term partners with a cool and searching caution. Cornelia, his wife, had died back in 69
BC
and Caesar, looking for a new bride, had fixed his eye on Pompeia, the granddaughter of Sulla, no less. Throughout his career, Caesar was to prove himself keenly aware of the need for good intelligence, and this was as evident in his selection of mistresses as in his choice of a wife. The great love of his life was Servilia – who just happened to be the half-sister of Cato, and therefore the sister-in-law of Lucullus. Just for good measure, she was also Catulus’ cousin. Who knows what family confidences Servilia may have whispered into her lover’s ear?

No wonder that Caesar’s enemies grew to be wary of his resources of charm. Just as he thought nothing of blowing a fortune on a single pearl for Servilia, so he mortgaged his future to seduce
his fellow citizens. More outrageously than anyone had ever done before, he translated the party spirit into the dimension of public life. In 65
BC
, at the age of thirty-five, he became aedile. This was not a magistracy that it was obligatory for would-be consuls to have held, but it was popular all the same, because aediles were responsible for the staging of public games. As such, it was an opportunity tailor-made for a showman such as Caesar. For the first time, gladiators were adorned in silver armour. Glittering magnificently, over three hundred pairs of them fought it out for the entertainment of the citizenry. The display would have been even more dazzling had not Caesar’s enemies rushed through legislation to limit the numbers. Senators could recognise a shameless bribe when they saw it. They also knew that no bribes were ever offered without an expectation of a return.