Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (45 page)

But Pompey himself, in private, was reassured. He knew that no men, not even Caesar’s, could subsist on roots for ever. Backed by Cato, who continued to mourn the death of every citizen, no matter from which side, he waited for Caesar’s army to fall to pieces. His strategy appeared to be paying off when Caesar in July 48
BC
, bruised by a stinging reversal in the no man’s land between the two armies, suddenly abandoned his position on the Adriatic coast and marched east. Now was the moment when Pompey, had he truly been the tyrant of Cicero’s forebodings, could have sailed for Italy unopposed – but he preferred to spare his native land the horrors of invasion. Instead, he too abandoned his fortifications on the coast. Leaving only a small garrison behind under the command of Cato, he set off eastwards after Caesar. Dogging his adversary’s every twist and turn, he emerged from the wilds of the Balkans into northern Greece. Here, around the city of Pharsalus, was flat, open land, perfect for a battle. Caesar was desperate to force a decisive engagement, and drew up his legions within sight of Pompey’s camp. Pompey refused to take the bait. He knew that in everything that counted – money, food supplies, support of the natives – time was on his side. For days Caesar continued to offer battle. For days Pompey remained within his camp.

But in his council of war tempers were fraying. The senators in Pompey’s train, impatient for action, wanted Caesar and his army wiped out. What was wrong with their generalissimo? Why would he not fight? The answer was all too readily to hand, bred of decades of suspicion and resentment: ‘They complained that Pompey was addicted to command, and took pleasure in treating former consuls
and praetors as though they were slaves.’
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So wrote his not unsympathetic adversary, who could give orders to his subordinates as he pleased and not be jeered at for it. But this was because Caesar, whatever he pretended otherwise, was not fighting as the champion of the Republic. Pompey was. To him, it was a title that meant everything. Now his colleagues, as jealous of overweening greatness as they had always been, demanded that he demonstrate his fitness to lead them by bowing to the wishes of the majority – let him crush Caesar once and for all! Pompey, reluctantly, gave way. The orders went out. Battle was to be joined the following day. Pompey the Great, by staking his own and the Republic’s future upon a single throw, had finally proved himself a good citizen.

But that night, as his fellow senators ordered victory banquets prepared and decked their tents with laurel, and quarrelled over who should inherit Caesar’s high priesthood, Pompey had a dream. He saw himself entering his great theatre on the Campus Martius, climbing the steps that led to the temple of Venus, and there, to the cheers and applause of the Roman people, dedicating the spoils of all his many victories to the goddess. It was enough to make him wake up in a cold sweat. Other men might have been cheered by such a vision, but Pompey remembered that Caesar was descended from Venus, and so he dreaded that all his laurels and greatness were on the point of being lost to him for ever, and becoming his rival’s.

And so it proved. The next morning, despite outnumbering the enemy more than two to one, it was Pompey’s army that was shattered and rolled back. Their opponents had been ordered not to throw their javelins, but to keep them as spears, aiming and stabbing them at the faces of the enemy cavalry, who were noblemen all, and vain of their good looks. Caesar, once the dandy nonpareil himself, had formulated the perfect tactic. Pompey’s cavalry turned and fled. Next, his loosely armed slingers and archers were cut
down. Domitius, leading the left wing, was killed as his legions buckled. Caesar’s men, outflanking Pompey’s line of battle, then attacked from the rear. By midday the battle was over. That evening it was Caesar who sat down in Pompey’s tent and ate the victory meal prepared by Pompey’s chef, off Pompey’s silver plate.

But as twilight deepened and stars began to blaze in the burning August night, he rose and returned to the battlefield. All around him were piles of Roman dead, and the cries of the wounded echoed across the plain of Pharsalus. ‘They were the ones who wanted this,’
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said Caesar, in mingled bitterness and grief, surveying the slaughter-ground. But he was wrong. No one had wanted the slaughter. That was the tragedy. Nor was it concluded yet. Caesar’s victory had been shattering, but the agony of the Republic appeared no nearer to a resolution. Rome and the world had fallen into the conqueror’s hands. So it seemed. But what was he to do with them? What could he do? After the cataclysm, how and what was Caesar to rebuild?

To the remnants of Pompey’s army, he displayed his celebrated clemency. Of those who accepted it, no one gave him greater joy than Marcus Brutus. After the battle Caesar had ordered a special search to be made for the son of his old flame, fearing for his safety. Once Brutus had been found unscathed, he was welcomed into the ranks of Caesar’s most intimate advisers. This was an appointment made of personal affection, but also calculation. Brutus was a widely respected man, and Caesar hoped that his recruitment might encourage other, more die-hard opponents to seek a similar reconciliation. He would not be entirely disappointed. Cicero, who had not been at Pharsalus, having stayed behind with Cato on the Adriatic coast, was one of those who decided that the war was as good as over. It almost cost him a lynching – only the intervention of Cato prevented him from being run through by a Pompeian sword. Cato himself, naturally, refused to countenance any
thought of surrender. Instead, embarking with his garrison, he set sail for Africa. This alone ensured that the war would continue. As a mark of his indomitability, Cato announced that not only would he continue to grow his hair and beard in mourning, but that he would never again lie down to eat. For a Roman, this was a grim resolution indeed.

And then, of course, there was Pompey. He too remained on the loose. After Pharsalus he had galloped out of the back gates of his camp to the Aegean coast, and from there, avoiding the bounty-hunters who were already buzzing on his trail, commandeered a ship to take him to Mitylene. It was here that he had left Cornelia, in the shadow of its theatre, the model for his own, and a reminder of happier days. Now, wounded by his first taste of defeat, Pompey needed the comfort that only his wife could provide. She did not disappoint. Her father the pornographer may have been a disgrace to his ancestors, but Cornelia, when brought the news of Pharsalus, knew precisely what was expected of her. A swoon, a wiping away of tears, a run through the streets of Mitylene, and Cornelia was in her husband’s arms. Pompey, a seasoned hand at playing the antique hero, was jolted by her performance into giving one of his own: a stern lecture on the importance of never abandoning hope. He may even have believed it. Yes, a battle had been lost – but not the East, and therefore not the war. True, many of the kings who owed Pompey their thrones had been at Pharsalus and either perished or surrendered – but not all. One in particular had been absent, and he was the ruler of the kingdom in the Mediterranean that was the richest in money, provisions and ships. Furthermore, he was only a boy, and his sister, who wanted the throne for herself, was in open rebellion against him, leaving his country easy meat for the master of the East. Or so Pompey hoped. The order was given. His small fleet headed south. Barely a month after Pharsalus, Pompey moored off the flat coast of Egypt.

Emissaries were sent to the King. After a few days spent bobbing at anchor off the sand bars, on 28 September 48
BC
Pompey saw a small fishing boat rowing towards his ship across the shallows. He was hailed in Latin, then a second time in Greek, and invited to board the boat. Pompey did so, having first embraced Cornelia and kissed her goodbye. As he was rowed towards the shore he attempted to engage his companions in conversation, but no one would answer him. Unsettled, Pompey looked towards the shore. There he could see the King, Ptolemy XIII, a boy dressed in his diadem and purple robes, waiting. Pompey was comforted. When he felt the keel of the boat run against the sand he rose to his feet. As he did so, suddenly, a Roman renegade drew a sword and ran him through the back. More blades were drawn. The blows rained down. ‘And Pompey, drawing his toga over his face with both hands, endured them all, nor did he say or do anything unworthy, only gave a faint groan.’
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And so perished Pompey the Great.

Cornelia, stranded on the deck of the trireme, saw it all. But there was nothing she or any of the crew could do, not even when they saw the Egyptians decapitate the man who had so recently been the greatest in the Roman Republic, and leave his naked body as jetsam on the shore. Instead, his followers had to turn and escape to open sea, leaving only one of Pompey’s freedmen, who had accompanied his former master in the fishing boat, to prepare a pyre. In this labour, according to Plutarch’s weird and haunting account, he happened to be joined by an old soldier, a veteran of Pompey’s first campaigns; and together the two men completed their pious task. Once the body had been burned a stone cairn was raised to mark the site, but the dunes soon engulfed it, and the memory of it was lost. Nothing beside remained. Boundless and bare, the lone and level sand stretched far away.

The coastline of the Nile Delta had always been treacherous. Low-lying and featureless, it offered nothing to help a sailor find his way. Even so, navigators who approached Egypt were not entirely bereft of guidance. At night, far distant from its shore, a dot of light flickered low in the southern sky. By day it could be seen for what it was: not a star, but a great lantern, set upon a tower, visible from miles out to sea. This was the Pharos, not only the tallest building ever built by the Greeks, but also, thanks to its endless recycling on tourist trinkets, the most instantly recognisable. A triumph of vision and engineering, the great lighthouse served as the perfect symbol for what it advertised: megalopolis – the most stupendous place on earth.

Even Roman visitors had to acknowledge that Alexandria was something special. When Caesar, three days after Pompey’s murder, sailed past the island on which the Pharos stood, he was arriving at a city larger,
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more cosmopolitan and certainly far more beautiful than his own. If Rome, shabby and labyrinthine, stood as a monument to the rugged virtues of the Republic, then Alexandria bore witness to what a king could achieve. But not just any king. The tomb of Alexander the Great still stood talisman-like in the city he had founded, and the street plan, a gridded lattice lined with gleaming colonnades, was recognisably the same as that mapped out three centuries earlier by the conquering Macedonian, to the roar of the lonely sea. Now, where once there had been nothing except for sand and wheeling marsh birds, there stretched a landscape of exquisite artificiality. Here was the first city ever to have numbered
addresses. Its banks oiled the commerce of East and West alike, its freight terminals churned with the trade of the world. Its celebrated library boasted seven hundred thousand scrolls and had been built in pursuit of a sublime fantasy: that every book ever written might be gathered in one place. There were even slot machines and automatic doors. Everything in Alexandria was a superlative. No wonder that Cicero, who regarded anywhere that was not Rome as ‘squalid obscurity’,
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should have made an exception for the one city that rivalled his own as the centre of the world. ‘Yes,’ he confessed, ‘I dream, and have long dreamed, of seeing Alexandria.’
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He was not the only Roman to be haunted by fantasies of the city. Egypt was a land of unrivalled fertility, and the proconsul who conquered Alexandria would have the bread-basket of the Mediterranean in his hands. This was a prospect that had long served to poison the already venomous swirl of Roman politics, breeding endless machinations and bribery scandals – yet no one, not even Crassus, not even Pompey, had succeeded in securing an Egyptian command. By unwritten consent, a prize so dazzling was a prize too far. In the view of most citizens it was safer and just as profitable to leave the ruling dynasty to administer the costs of its own exploitation. A succession of monarchs had played the role of the Republic’s poodle to perfection: secure enough to squeeze their subjects dry on behalf of their patrons, weak enough never to present the slightest threat to Rome. On such a humiliating basis was the last independent kingdom of the Greeks, originally founded by a general of Alexander and once the greatest power in the East, permitted to limp along.

But the kings of Egypt were nothing if not survivors. The Ptolemy who had watched Pompey being butchered in the surf was the namesake of a long line of monarchs who had always been prepared to swallow any indignity and perpetrate any outrage to keep a hold on power. To the greed, viciousness and sensuality that had
characterised all the Greek dynasties in the East, the Ptolemies had added their own refinement, derived from Egypt’s pharaonic past: habitual incest. The effects of their inbreeding could be seen not only in the murderous quality of the Ptolemies’ palace intrigues, but also in a decadence exceptional even by the standards of contemporary royalty. The Romans openly regarded the Ptolemies as monstrosities, and saw it as their republican duty to rub this in at every opportunity. If the king were gross and effete, then visiting proconsuls would take delight in forcing him to lumber through the streets of Alexandria, wobbling in his diaphanous robes as he sweated to keep up. Other Romans found more vivid ways of expressing their scorn. Cato, called upon by a Ptolemy while he was administering Cyprus, had greeted the King of Egypt amid the after-effects of a laxative, and spent the entire audience sitting on the lavatory.