Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (35 page)

Already the two were being elided. That winter of 58–57
BC,
rather than withdrawing his legions back into his province, Caesar left them billeted a hundred miles north of the frontier, deep in the territory of a supposedly independent tribe. Once again, an illegal measure was justified by the proconsul as an act of forward defence. This was an argument that may have satisfied public opinion back in Rome, but it did nothing to ease a mounting sense of outrage in Gaul itself. The full implications of Caesar’s new policy were by now starting to hit home. What precisely would satisfy the Romans’ desire for a defensible frontier? If the Rhine to the east, then why
not the Channel to the north, or the Atlantic coast to the west? Across frozen forests and fields, from village to village, from chieftain’s hall to chieftain’s hall, the same rumour was borne: the Romans were aiming ‘to pacify all Gaul’.
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As warriors burnished their glittering, jewel-wrought shields, and striplings, eager to prove themselves ready for battle, forded ice-sheeted streams with full armour on their backs, so rival tribes sought to patch up their differences. Free Gaul prepared itself for war.

As did Caesar. He was not the man to tolerate anti-Roman agitation. It made no difference whether a tribe had been defeated or was free, the Republic demanded respect, and honour required that a proconsul instil it. Having provoked the Gauls into defiance, Caesar now felt perfectly justified in smashing it. That winter he recruited two more legions. High-handedly, and without any reference to the Senate, he had already doubled the number of troops originally allocated to his province. When winter thawed to spring and Caesar left camp, he had an army of eight legions, some forty thousand men, by his side.

He would need every last one. Heading due north, Caesar was venturing into territory never before penetrated by Roman forces. It was shadow-haunted, sinister, dank with mud and slaughter. Travellers whispered of strange rites of sacrifice, performed in the dead of oaken glades, or by the side of black-watered, bottomless lakes. Sometimes, it was said, the nights would be lit by vast torches of wickerwork, erected in the forms of giants, their limbs and bellies filled with prisoners writhing in an orgy of death. Even at the feasts for which the Gauls were famous, their customs were barbarous and repulsive. The ubiquitous Posidonius, who had travelled through Gaul in the nineties
BC
, taking notes wherever he went, observed that duels were common over the best cuts of meat, and that even when warriors did get round to feasting they would not lie down to eat, as civilised men did, but would sit and let their
straggling moustaches drip with grease and gravy. Blank-eyed spectators of these scenes of gluttony, and a spectacle even more repellent, were the severed heads of the warriors’ enemies, stuck on poles or in niches. So universally were these used as decorations in Gaulish villages that, Posidonius confessed, he had almost grown used to them by the end of his trip.
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To the legionaries, marching ever further north along pitted, winding tracks, peering nervously through the endless screens of trees, it must have appeared that they were entering a realm of utter darkness. This was why, on their shoulders, they bore stakes as well as spears. The camp they built after every day’s march, always identical, night after night, provided them not only with security against ambushes, but also a reminder of civilisation, of home. In the midst of barbarism, a forum and two straight streets would be laid out. The sentries, peering out into the blackness from behind the palisade, would have the comfort of knowing that behind them, at least, there was a corner of a foreign field that was temporarily Rome.

Yet what appeared impossibly barbarous to the legionaries had already been synthesised and fed through Caesar’s intelligence machine. Their general knew precisely where he was heading – and it was not into the unknown. Caesar may have been the first to lead the legions beyond the frontier, but there had been Italians roaming through the wilds of Gaul for decades. In the second century
BC
, with the establishment of permanent Roman garrisons in the south of the country, the natives of the province had begun to develop a taste for their conquerors’ vices. One, in particular, had gone straight to their heads: wine. The Gauls, who had never come across the drink before, had not the slightest idea how to handle it. Rather than diluting it with water, as the Romans did, they preferred to down it neat, wallowing in drunken binges, and ‘ending up so inebriated that they either fall asleep or go mad’.
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Merchants,
who found this style of consumption highly lucrative, had begun to foster it as widely as they could, travelling far beyond the limits of the Roman province, until soon enough the whole of Gaul had grown sodden with liquor. Naturally, with a market of alcoholics to exploit, the merchants had begun to inflate their prices. Since their ability to do this depended on the natives not cultivating their own vineyards, the Senate, ever savvy when it came to fleecing foreigners, had made it illegal to sell vines to ‘the tribes beyond the Alps’.
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By Caesar’s time the exchange rate had stabilised at a jar of wine for one slave, which, at least as far as the Italians were concerned, made for a fabulously profitable import–export business. The slaves could be sold on for a huge mark-up, and the extra manpower available to Roman viticulturists enabled ever more gallons of wine to be produced. It was a virtuous circle that kept everyone – apart from the slaves, of course – happy. The Gauls stayed sozzled, and the merchants grew rich.

Caesar, in daring to imagine that he could impose himself upon a country as vast, warlike and independent as Gaul, was perfectly aware how much he owed to Italian exporters. It was not only that they provided him with spies. The Germans, having witnessed the effect of wine on the Gauls, had gone so far as to ‘ban it from being imported into their own country, because they think it makes men soft’.
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Quarrelsome too. Wine was more precious to Gallic chieftains than gold. Tribes were endlessly raiding each other for slaves, depopulating the countryside with their razzias, breeding bestial, debilitating rivalries – all of which made them easy prey for a man such as Caesar. Even when his spies reported that a confederation numbering 240,000 had been formed against him, he was unperturbed. This was despite the fact that the tribes in his way belonged to the Belgae, the people who, because ‘they were furthest removed from the civilisation and luxury of the Roman province, and were least often visited by merchants importing the kind of goods which
lead to effeminacy’,
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were reckoned the bravest in Gaul. Caesar struck against them hard, with all the steel-armoured efficiency he could bring to bear. The further north he advanced, the more the Belgic alliance fragmented. Tribes who submitted were treated with ostentatious generosity. Those who resisted were wiped out. Caesar’s eagles were duly planted on the coast of the North Sea. At the same time messengers came to him from Publius Crassus, the dashing young son of the triumvir, with news that the legion under his command had received the submission of all the tribes in the west. ‘Peace’, Caesar wrote in triumph, ‘had been brought to the whole of Gaul.’
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The news was received ecstatically back in Rome. In 63 Pompey had been granted ten days of public thanksgiving. Now, in 57, Caesar was awarded fifteen. Not even his bitterest enemies could deny the stunning nature of his achievements. After all, nothing that enhanced the prestige of the Republic could be reckoned a crime, and Caesar, by teaching the Gauls to honour its name, had brought into the orbit of Rome people previously lost in the darkness of barbarism. As one of his old opponents gushed in the Senate, ‘regions and nations unreported to us in books, or in first-hand accounts, or even by rumours, have now been penetrated by our general, our army, and the arms of the Roman people’.
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Rejoice indeed!

Yet, for Caesar, there could be no relaxing. Deep and devastating though his incursion had been, a single raid had hardly been sufficient to reduce Gaul to the status of a province. For now, the country was prepared to acknowledge Caesar’s prestige, but supremacy, among a people as inveterately competitive and quarrelsome as the Gauls, was founded on treacherous sands. And so it was too, of course, in Rome. This was why Caesar, even in the damp forests of the north, still had to keep one eye firmly fixed on the political battlefield in the capital. Events in Rome did not stand still just because he was absent. Much had already changed. Nothing
better illustrated this than the identity of the man who had stood up in the Senate to propose the thanksgiving for Caesar’s achievements in Gaul. After a bitter exile of eighteen months Cicero had returned to Rome.

In the dark days before his flight into exile the frantic orator had gone grovelling to Pompey as well as to Caesar. Cicero had long despaired of his idol’s failings, but he had never entirely given up on him. Despite Pompey’s evident complicity in the outrages of Caesar’s consulship, Cicero had continued to hope against hope that all might yet be well, and the great man be won back to the cause of legitimacy. Pompey, for his part, had been flattered to play the role of Cicero’s patron, and had even condescended to warn Clodius against pushing his vendetta too far. There had been a certain pathos in this gesture: at a time when his popularity was in free fall, and he was being booed for the first time in his life, Pompey had found in Cicero’s hero-worship a welcome reminder of the good old days. Desperate to unburden his doubts and frustrations, he had even confessed to the orator that he regretted his role in the triumvirate – a revelation that Cicero, in high excitement, had immediately passed on to all his friends. Inevitably, Caesar had got wind of it – and been confirmed in his view that Cicero would have to go. Pompey, forced to choose between his father-in-law and his trusting friend, had reluctantly acquiesced. As Clodius’ persecution of Cicero reached its violent climax, so he had retired in embarrassment to his country villa. Refusing to take the hint, Cicero had pursued him there. He had been informed by the doorman that no one was at home. Pompey, unable to face an interview with the man he had betrayed, had slipped out through the back.

With Cicero safely gone, the great man was plunged into a renewed bout of brooding. Equivocations did not sit well with his self-image. He was still no nearer to squaring the impossible circle that had tormented him since his return from the East. He wanted the respect and admiration of his peers, and the supreme authority to which he believed his achievements entitled him – but he could not have both. Now, having made his choice, he found that power without love had a bitter taste. Spurned by Rome, Pompey turned for comfort instead to his wife. He had married Caesar’s daughter, Julia, for the chilliest of political motives, but it had not taken him long to grow helplessly smitten with his young bride. Julia, for her part, gave her husband the adoration without which he could not flourish. Surrendering to their mutual passion, the couple began to spend more and more time secluded in a love nest in the country. Pompey’s fellow citizens, unaccustomed as they were to displays of conjugal affection, sniggered in prurient disapproval. Here was true scandal. The public resentment of Pompey began to grow tinged with scorn.

No one was more sensitive to this changing wind of opinion than Clodius. He had a good nose for weakness, and began to wonder whether Pompey, for all the glamour of his reputation and his loyal veterans, might not perhaps be a man of straw – a hunch far too tempting not to be put immediately to the test. Aware that nothing would prove more vexatious to Pompey than a renewed assault on his settlement of the East – the issue which, after all, had forced him into the fateful alliance with Crassus and Caesar in the first place – Clodius went straight for the jugular. Prince Tigranes, the son of the King of Armenia, was still in Rome as a hostage, eight years after his father had handed him over to Pompey as a guarantee of good behaviour. Clodius not only abducted the Prince from under the great man’s nose, but then, to add injury to insult, put him on a boat bound for Armenia. When Pompey tried to seize back his hostage, his supporters were set upon and beaten
up. The establishment, far from taking Pompey’s side, relished the spectacle of his impotent rage. This, of course, was precisely what Clodius had been banking on. Even as his gangs were rampaging through the streets, he found himself basking in the glow of the Senate’s approval.

Not that Clodius, given the opportunity to humiliate an enemy, had ever needed much encouragement. As with Cicero, so now with Pompey, he could smell blood. His gangs duly went into a feeding frenzy. Whenever the unhappy Pompey ventured into the Forum he would be greeted with a chorus of jeers. This was no idle matter. One of the most ancient laws of the Republic defined the chanting of abuse as akin to murder. By the light of such tradition Clodius was issuing death-threats, and Pompey was unnerved accordingly. He had never before been the object of such mockery. His passion for his wife provoked particular hilarity. ‘“What’s the name of the sex-mad general?”’ Clodius would yell. ‘“Who touches the side of his head with his finger?” … And after each question, he would make a signal to the mob by shaking out the folds of his toga, and his gangs, like a trained chorus, would scream out the answer in unison: “Pompey!”’
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‘Who touches the side of his head with his finger?’ For a man given to dressing up as a dancing-girl to accuse Rome’s greatest general of effeminacy took some nerve. This was all the more so because many of his most intimate circle were also embroiled in sex scandals. Mark Antony, moving on from his affair with Curio, had begun sniffing around Clodius’ much-loved wife, Fulvia, a breach of the codes of friendship that would soon see the two men threatening to kill each other. Similar trouble was also brewing over a woman to whom Clodius was even more passionately devoted. Following his triumphant prosecution of Hybrida, Marcus Caelius had celebrated by renting a luxury apartment from Clodius on the Palatine. There he had met Clodia. Witty, handsome and famous for
his rhythm, Caelius had proved to be just the widow’s type. The ambitious Caelius had needed no encouragement to take up with a Claudian, and Clodia, with her husband barely cold, was evidently in the mood for consolation. Of course, her idiosyncratic style of mourning could not help but raise eyebrows. The affairs of the great lady remained a topic of abiding interest to Rome’s scandal-rakers, and a favourite theme of abusive sloganeering in the Forum. But no matter what was chanted against him and his sister, Clodius was always able to drown it out. Charges of immorality only provoked him to ever more furious denunciations of his own. The outrageous hypocrisy of it all only added to the fun. And so the abuse of Pompey and his lechery continued.