Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (36 page)

Of course, Clodius being Clodius, he could not resist seeing just how far the intimidation could be pushed. In August, as Pompey was crossing the Forum to attend a meeting of the Senate, a clattering of metal on stone rang out from the temple of Castor. One of Clodius’ slaves had pointedly dropped a dagger. Pompey, believing his life to be in danger, at once retreated from the Forum and barricaded himself behind his front door. Clodius’ gangs pursued him and set up camp outside. The tribune threatened to do to Pompey what he had already done to Cicero: seize his mansion, level it and build a temple to Liberty in its place. Pompey, unlike Cicero, did not bolt and run, but he found himself blockaded, unable to leave his house – a staggering reversal for the greatest man in the Republic. Again the Senate watched on in smug satisfaction. Crassus, with whom Clodius had been careful to remain on excellent terms, naturally shared in the general smirking. For Clodius himself, it was an intoxicating, scarcely believable moment of triumph. Champion of the aristocracy, patron of the slums, he appeared to be the master of Rome.

But only fleetingly. By testing the opportunities provided by street violence to the very limits, Clodius had blazed a trail that
others were already preparing to follow. In December 58 Clodius’ term of office came to an end. Among the new tribunes was a gruff and brutal Pompeian, Titus Annius Milo. Encouraged by his patron, Milo formally indicted Clodius for employing violence, an open-and-shut case if ever there was one. Clodius, by appealing to his brother Appius, who was praetor that year, managed to have the charge suppressed, and ordered his gangs to ransack Milo’s house in revenge. But the new tribune, backed by the infinite resources of Pompey, and aware that he was dead meat unless he met violence with violence, refused to be intimidated. He began to recruit gangs of his own, not, as Clodius had done, by bribing amateurs from the slums, but by importing well-armed, well-trained heavies from Pompey’s estates and buying up gladiators to steel their ranks. At a stroke, Clodius’ monopoly on street violence ended, a challenge to which the former tribune rose with predictable gusto. The gang warfare escalated daily. Soon, it had become so brutal that all government institutions in the Forum, including the law courts, had to be suspended. Day after day, across the public places of Rome, the tides of anarchy ebbed and flowed.

By such desperate measures did Pompey impose himself and his authority back upon a city in which for months he had been kept under virtual house arrest. Yet the Senate, as well as the streets, had to be bent to his will, and Clodius, the arrogant, impossible Clodius, given a taste of his own medicine. The obvious means for achieving that was even then wringing his hands in high-flown misery across the Adriatic. Pompey, having refused to exert himself to save Cicero the year before, now began touring Italy, drumming up support for the exile’s return. Clients in the countryside and provincial towns were ordered to Rome. All through the summer of 57 they flooded into the capital. Meanwhile, Caesar, far away in Gaul, had been persuaded to give his reluctant approval to Cicero’s recall, and a vote in the Senate also backed it, by 416 to 1.
The dissenting voice had, inevitably, belonged to Clodius. In August the long-awaited public vote was finally held in the Campus Martius. Clodius, attempting to disrupt it, was seen off with contemptuous ease by Milo, whose gangs stood on guard all day by the Ovile. So confident was Cicero of the result that he had already set sail for Italy as the vote was being held, and he was brought the news of his official recall as he waited in Brundisium. His progress from then on, with Tullia, his adored and much-missed daughter by his side, was like a dream come true. Cheering supporters lined the Appian Way. As he approached Rome the crowds streamed out to greet him. Applause followed him wherever he went. ‘I did not simply return home,’ he observed modestly, ‘but ascended to the sky.’
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But not even Cicero was conceited enough to doubt that the real triumph had been Pompey’s. More than ever, the orator’s old, familiar boasting had a shrillness bred of fear. Every Roman found it an agony to owe another man a favour, and Cicero now owed Pompey and Caesar his career. Hence his gushing in the Senate House. As well as leading the praise for Caesar’s conquests, he found himself proposing that Rome’s entire corn supply be put into Pompey’s hands. The motion was passed, but only once Clodius, with hateful logic, had pointed out to the Senate House its precise implications: Pompey would be able to bribe the starving slums with bread, while Cicero, the self-proclaimed scourge of demagoguery, now stood revealed as its agent. The bare-faced effrontery of these accusations did not make them any less true. Cicero duly spluttered and squirmed.

The exchange in the Senate House had served notice that Clodius felt not remotely chastened by his enemy’s return. When Cicero succeeded in persuading Rome’s priests that his mansion on the Palatine could be restored to him without offence to the goddess Liberty, Clodius resorted to naked terrorism. Cicero’s
workmen were driven from the building-site; his brother’s house was set on fire; Cicero himself was assaulted on the via Sacra. At the same time the street fighting between Clodius and Milo reached a new pitch of violence, and the two gang leaders, each openly threatening to murder the other, also attempted to pursue each other through the courts. Once again, Milo indicted Clodius on a charge of using violence, and once again, by pulling strings in the Senate, Clodius wriggled free. In February 56, with a hypocrisy remarkable by even his standards, Clodius brought an identical charge against Milo. Cicero and Pompey, rallying to their man’s cause, prepared to speak in Milo’s defence. The spectacle of his three deadliest enemies lined up against him threw Clodius into a frenzy. As Pompey rose to speak the Forum seethed with catcalls and jeers. Clodius, from the prosecutor’s bench, began cheering on his gangs. As he had done before, he stood and tugged on his toga, giving cues to his supporters as they chanted abuse. Soon they were spitting at Milo’s strongarms, then throwing fists and stones. Milo’s gangs fought back. Clodius himself was dragged off the rostra, and a full-scale battle broke out. Amid the pandemonium, the trial itself was abandoned.

Pompey, shaken and bruised, retired from the Forum pale with fury. He was in no doubt who the mastermind behind the riot had been – and it was not Clodius. For three years Pompey had been in a syndicate with Crassus, and still he was quick to blame his old nemesis for every debacle. On this occasion, however, his suspicions appeared well founded. Ever since autumn 57, and his appointment as Rome’s grain commissar, Pompey had been angling for another Eastern command. So too had Crassus. Until the riot, mutual self-interest had kept their rivalry in the shadows, but Clodius, typically, had ripped aside the veil. ‘Who’s after a trip east?’ he had bellowed to his gangs. ‘Pompey!’ the gangs had thundered back in reply. ‘Who do we all want to go instead?’ The answer had
been deafening, and calculated to give Pompey apoplexy: ‘Crassus!’
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A few days later Pompey told Cicero that he blamed his partner in the triumvirate for the riot, for Clodius, for everything. He then confided, just for good measure, that Crassus was plotting to have him killed.

The news spread like wildfire. The triumvirate was finished. That much, at least, seemed clear to everyone. If anyone did express surprise, it was only that the syndicate had lasted so long. After all, as surely as the seasons passed, so too did the grip of great men upon power. In that spring of 56
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the thaw seemed general throughout the Republic. Old enemies of the triumvirate – Bibulus, Curio – began to stir, stretch their limbs, wake from hibernation. In the Senate the riot in the Forum was officially condemned as ‘contrary to the interests of the Republic’,
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and the responsibility for it pinned not on Clodius but on Pompey. This insult to his honour needled the great man into another vast explosion of temper, and, inevitably, he blamed Crassus. But although this may briefly have served to cheer him up, the evidence of his unpopularity with the entire Senate was now too glaring to be ignored. All his dearest ambitions – to bask in the praise and respect of his peers, to lead a brilliant second command to the East – stood revealed as hopeless fantasies. For Pompey the Great, it appeared, the glory days were over. As his fury subsided he plunged into a massive sulk.

The scent of his failure hung like carrion-perfume over Rome. In the Senate scavengers whined and snarled with excitement. With Pompey wallowing helplessly in the shallows, attention next turned to the prospects for beaching a second big beast. Caesar’s enemies knew that there would never be a better opportunity to finish him off. Three years they had been waiting – and now, at last, one of them moved in for the kill.

Courage came easily to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. In his case it was indistinguishable from an arrogance so pronounced as to
verge on stupidity. Obscenely rich, obscenely well bred, he was a man described by Cicero, who was sensitive to such things, as having been born a consul-designate. In that spring of 56, Domitius prepared to claim his birthright. A brother-in-law of Cato, a blood-enemy of Pompey, who had executed Domitius’ brother in the dark days of the civil war, there could be no doubting where his loyalties would lie. In announcing that he would stand for the consulship, he openly declared that, if elected, he would have Caesar’s command declared invalid. As a replacement, naturally, he proposed himself. Transalpine Gaul had been conquered by his grandfather and he regarded it as his by hereditary right. At his back the establishment bayed its approval. First Pompey; now Caesar – surely the over-reachers, the would-be tyrants, were doomed?

Four and a half centuries of the Republic’s history said that they were. Tradition was stronger than any triumvirate. One man slipped, another took his place. This was how it had always been. Let Pompey, Caesar and their successors be eclipsed. Whatever happened, the Republic would endure.

Or so everyone assumed.

As the triumvirate splintered, others, lower down the food chain, were engaged in desperate struggles of their own. At the beginning of April, Marcus Caelius was brought to trial. His colourful past did not bear close scrutiny. Certainly, the prosecution had no problem in alleging a vast range of vices and crimes, including – most shockingly of all – an assault on a deputation of ambassadors and the murder of its leader. What gave the trial its whiff of scandal, however, was a further charge: that Caelius had attempted to poison his lover, Clodia Metelli. Clearly the relationship had not been going well.

Not that the prosecutors ever even alluded to it. Because the details of the affair promised to be as damaging to Caelius as to Clodia, they had calculated that the defence team would be equally as discreet. But they had reckoned without Cicero. Relations with his old pupil had long been rocky, but the opportunity to launch a full-frontal assault on Clodia had been too good to miss. Rather than draw a veil over the affair, Cicero instead chose to make it the focus of his entire defence. ‘Suppose a woman who has lost her
husband throws her house open to every man who needs sexual release, and publicly lives the life of a prostitute, suppose she thinks nothing of going to parties given by total strangers, suppose she carries on like this in Rome, in her pleasure-gardens, and among the orgy-set at Baiae,’ he thundered, ‘then do you really think it would be scandalous and disgraceful for a young man such as Caelius to have picked her up?’
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Of course not! After all, she was only a streetwalker, and therefore fair game! The jurors, listening to Rome’s queen of chic being eviscerated in this manner, were titillated and appalled. What they failed to notice was that Cicero, by going after his enemy’s sister, had obscured all the really serious charges against his client beneath a froth of innuendo. The strategy proved to be gratifyingly successful: Caelius was acquitted. Cicero could purr with satisfaction at a hatchet-job well done.

So dazzling had the performance been that it quite put in the shade a speech delivered at the trial by Caelius’ other guardian. Not that this would have concerned Crassus. He had never been one for pyrotechnics. He had no need of them. His purpose in coming to Caelius’ rescue had been to protect his investment in the young man’s future; a goal duly achieved, and at minimal political cost to himself. True, he had been privy to the demolition of Clodia, but even Clodius, rarely reticent in defence of his family’s honour, knew better than to lash out at Crassus. Subtle and understated in his methods he may have been, a man of whispered hints and promises rather than open threats, yet he remained the most menacing figure in Rome. Now at last, in the spring of 56, Crassus was preparing to test just how far that menace would carry him. Even as he spoke at Caelius’ trial his mind was elsewhere. A political masterstroke was being prepared.

The previous month Crassus had travelled to Ravenna, a town just beyond the frontier of Roman Italy, inside Caesar’s province of Gaul. Two other power-brokers had been waiting there for him.
One had been Caesar himself, the other Clodius’ haughty eldest brother, Appius Claudius. Following a secret conference between the three men Crassus had returned to Rome, while Appius, staying with Caesar, had headed west. In mid-April the two conspirators arrived in the frontier town of Lucca. So too, heading north from Rome, did Pompey. A second conference was held. Again, its precise terms remained mysterious, but news of the meeting itself had spread so quickly that Pompey, arriving for it, had been accompanied by two hundred senators. More than a hundred bundles of
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could be seen propped up in the Luccan streets. Senators on the make, their nostrils filled with the scent of power, scrabbled for advancement. To their more principled colleagues back in Rome, the clamouring of these aristocratic petitioners delivered an ominous message. Once again, authority appeared to be draining away from the Senate. Perhaps the triumvirate was not dead, after all?