Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (8 page)

Even so, as in any partnership, there was nothing like a dispute over money to breed tension. News of the windfall from Pergamum arrived just in time for that doughty champion of the people, Tiberius Gracchus, to propose that it be spent on funding his ambitious reforms. The people themselves, naturally enough, agreed. Most of Tiberius’ fellow senators, however, did not, and dug in their heels. In part, of course, this reflected distaste for Tiberius’ demagoguery, and indignation that he should dare to trample on the Senate’s august toes. But there was more to the opposition than a simple fit of pique. The prospect of inheriting an entire kingdom did indeed affront long-held Roman principles. Pre-eminent among these were an identification of gold with moral corruption and a hearty suspicion of Asiatics. Senators, of course, could afford to stand up for such traditional values, but there was also a more practical reason why they should have regarded the bequest of Pergamum as an embarrassment. Provinces, it was assumed, were burdensome to run. There were subtler ways of fleecing foreigners than by imposing direct rule on them. The Senate’s preferred policy, practised throughout the East, had always been to maintain a delicate balance between exploitation and disengagement. Now, it seemed, that balance was in danger of being upset.

So, initially, the Senate – aside from colluding in Tiberius’ murder – did nothing. Only when the kingdom’s collapse into anarchy threatened the stability of the entire region was an army finally dispatched to Pergamum, and even then it took several years of desultory campaigning before the Republic’s new subjects were
brought to heel. Still the Senate refrained from establishing Rome’s first province in Asia. Instead, the commissioners sent to regulate the kingdom were carefully instructed to uphold the regulations of the kings they were replacing. As was invariably the Roman way, the emphasis lay on pretending that nothing much had changed.

So it was that a governing class that had been responsible for guiding its city to a position of unparalleled world power, bringing the entire Mediterranean under its effective control, and annihilating anyone who dared to oppose it, still clung to its instinctive isolationism. As far as Roman magistrates were concerned, abroad remained what it had always been: a field for the winning of glory. While plunder was never to be sniffed at, honour remained the truest measure of both a city and a man. By holding to this ideal, the members of the Roman aristocracy could reassure themselves that they remained true to the traditions of their rugged forefathers, even as they revelled in the sway of their command. As long as the effete monarchs of Asia sent their embassies crawling to learn the every whim of the Senate, as long as the desert nomads of Africa reined in their savagery at the merest frown of a legionary commander, as long as the wild barbarians of Gaul dreaded to challenge the unconquerable might of the Republic, then Rome was content. Respect was all the tribute she demanded and required.

But if the senatorial elite, confident already in their own wealth and status, could afford to believe this, then businessmen and financiers, to say nothing of the vast mass of the poor, had very different ideas. The Romans had always associated the East with gold. Now, with the settlement of Pergamum, came the opportunity to start looting it systematically. Ironically, it was the Senate’s insistence that the traditional governance of Pergamum be respected that pointed the way. Governance, to the Pergamene kings, had meant taxing their subjects for all they could get. It was an example from which the Romans had much to learn. While it
had been a constant principle of the Republic that war should turn a profit, profit, to the Romans, had tended to mean plunder. In the barbarian West, it was true, conquest had generally been followed by taxation, but only because otherwise there would have been no administration at all. In the East administration had existed long before Rome. For this reason it had always seemed cheaper, and far less bother, to pillage with abandon, and then to top up funds with an indemnity or two.

Pergamum, however, illustrated that taxation could indeed be made to pay – that it was a glittering opportunity, in fact, and not at all a chore. Soon enough the officials who had been sent to administer the kingdom were wallowing in peculation. Extravagant rumours of their activities began to filter back to Rome. There was outrage: Pergamum was the property of the Roman people, and if there were pickings to be had, then the Roman people wanted their proper share. Mouthpiece for this resentment was none other than Gaius Gracchus, tribune in succession to his murdered brother, and just as keen to lay his hands on the Pergamene bonanza as Tiberius had been. He, too, was proposing ambitious social reforms; he, too, needed quick funds. So it was that in 123, after a decade of agitation, Gaius Gracchus finally succeeded in pushing through a fateful law. By its terms, Pergamum was at last subjected to organised taxation. The lid of the honeypot was now well and truly off.
⁶

Pragmatic and cynical in equal measure, the new tax regime worked by actively fostering greed. Lacking the huge bureaucracies that the monarchs of the East relied upon to squeeze their subjects, the Republic turned instead to the private sector to provide the necessary expertise. Tax-farming contracts were publicly auctioned, with those who bought them advancing in full the tribute owed to the state. Since the sums demanded were astronomical, only the very wealthiest could afford to pay them, and even then
not as individual contractors. Instead, resources would be pooled, and the resulting companies administered, as befitted huge financial concerns, with elaborate care. Shares might be offered, general meetings held, directors elected to the service of the board. In the province itself a consortium’s employees would include soldiers, sailors and postmen, quite apart from the tax-collecting staff. The name given to the businessmen who ran these cartels,
publicani
, harked back to their function as agents of the state, but there was nothing public spirited about the services they provided. Profit was all, and the more obscene the better. The aim was not only to collect the official tribute owed to the state, but also to strongarm the provincials into paying extra for the privilege of being fleeced. If necessary, commercial know-how would complement the thuggery. A debtor might be offered loans at ruinous rates and then, once he had been leeched of everything he owned, enslaved. Far distant in Rome, what did the shareholders of the great corporations care for the suffering they imposed? Cities were no longer sacked, they were bled to death instead.

Ostensibly, Rome’s subjects did have some recourse against the depredations of their tormentors. The taxation system may have been privatised, but the province’s administration remained in the hands of the senatorial elite – the class still most imbued with the ideals of the Republic. These ideals obliged governors to provide their subjects with the benefits of peace and justice. In reality, so lucrative were the bribes on offer that even the sternest principles had the habit of eroding into dust. Roman probity fast became a sick joke. To the wretched provincials, there appeared little difference between
publicani
and the senators sent to govern them. Both had their snouts in the same loot-filled trough.

As a spectacle of greed, the rape of Pergamum was certainly blatant. The vast sway of the Republic’s power, won in the cause of the honour of Rome, stood nakedly revealed as a licence to make
money. The resulting goldrush was soon a stampede. Highways originally built as instruments of war now served to bring the taxman faster to his victim; pack-animals straining beneath the weight of tribute clopped along the roads behind the legionaries. Across the Mediterranean, increasingly a Roman lake, shipping sailed for Italy, crammed with the fruits of colonial extortion. The arteries of empire were hardening with gold, and the more they hardened, so the more gold Rome squeezed out.

As her grip tightened, so the very appearance of her provinces began to alter, as though giant fingers were gouging deep into the landscape. In the East great cities were ransacked for treasure – but in the West it was the earth. The result was mining on a scale not to be witnessed again until the Industrial Revolution. Nowhere was the devastation more spectacular than in Spain. Observer after observer bore stunned witness to what they saw. Even in far off Judaea, people ‘had heard what the Romans had done in the country of Spain, for the winning of the silver and the gold which is there’.
⁷

The mines that Rome had annexed from Carthage more than a century previously had been handed over to the
publicani
, who had proceeded to exploit them with their customary gusto. A single network of tunnels might spread for more than a hundred square miles, and provide upwards of forty thousand slaves with a living death. Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas-clouds were never far behind.

Initially, large areas of Spain had been regarded as too remote and dangerous to exploit, the haunt of tribesmen so irredeemably savage that they believed banditry to be an honourable profession,
and used urine to brush their teeth.
*
By the last years of the second century
BC
, however, all except the north of the peninsula had been opened up for business.
†
Huge new mines were sunk across central and south-western Spain. Measurements of lead in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers, which show a staggering increase in concentration during this period, bear witness to the volumes of poisonous smoke they belched out.
⁸
The ore being smelted was silver: it has been estimated that for every ton of silver extracted over ten thousand tons of rock had to be quarried. It has also been estimated that by the early first century
BC
, the Roman mint was using fifty tons of silver each year.
⁹

As in Asia, so in Spain, the huge scale of such operations could not have been achieved without collusion between the public and private sectors. Increasingly, in return for providing investors back in Rome with docile natives, decent harbours and good roads, the Roman authorities in the provinces began to look for backhanders. The corruption that resulted from this was all the more insidious because it could never be acknowledged. Even as they raked in the cash, senators still affected a snooty disdain towards finance. The contempt for profit was even enshrined in law: no
publicanus
was allowed to join the Senate, just as no senator was permitted to engage in anything so vulgar as overseas trade. Behind the scenes, however, such legislation did little to fulfil its aims. If anything, by prescribing how governor and entrepreneur could best collaborate, it only served to bring them closer together: the one needed the other if they were both to end up rich. The result was that
Roman government increasingly began to mutate into what can perhaps best be described as a military-fiscal complex. In the years following the Pergamene bequest motives of profit and prestige grew ever more confused. The traditional policy of isolationism came increasingly under threat. And all the while the provincials were exploited ever more.

Not that every ideal of the Republic was dead. There were some administrators so appalled by what was happening that they attempted to take a stand against it. This was a dangerous policy – for if the business cartels ever found their interests seriously threatened, they were quick to muscle in. Their most notorious victim was Rutilius Rufus, a provincial administrator celebrated for his rectitude who had sought to defend his subjects against the tax-collectors, and who in 92
BC
was brought to trial before a jury stuffed with supporters of the
publicani
. Big business had successfully oiled the workings of the court: the charge – selected with deliberate effrontery – was extortion. After he had been convicted Rufus, with matching effrontery, chose as the place of his exile the very province he was supposed to have looted. There he was loudly welcomed with honours and scattered flowers.

The province was Asia: formerly the kingdom of Pergamum and still, forty years after it had been given to them, the Romans’ favourite milch-cow. To the provincials, the conviction of Rufus must have seemed the final straw: proof, if proof were still needed, that Roman greed would never restrain itself. Yet what could be done? No one dared fight back. The charred rubble of Corinth testified eloquently to the perils of doing that. Despair as well as taxes crushed the Greeks of Asia. How could they ever hope to throw the Republic, its rapacious financiers and invincible legions off their backs?

Then, at last, three years after the conviction of Rufus, the provincial authorities pushed their money-grubbing too far.
Looking to widen their activities, Roman business interests began casting greedy eyes on Pontus, a kingdom on the Black Sea coast in the north of what is now Turkey. In the summer of 89 the Roman commissioner in Asia, Manius Aquillius, trumped up an excuse for an invasion. Rather than risk his own troops’ lives, he preferred to order a client-king to do the fighting for him – having assumed, with fatal complacency, that any fallout from such a provocation would be easily containable. But the King of Pontus, Mithridates, was no ordinary opponent. His biography, carefully honed by a genius for florid propaganda, read like a fairy tale. Persecuted by his wicked mother as a child, the young prince had been forced to take refuge in a forest. Here he had lived for seven years, outrunning deer and outfighting lions. Nervous that his mother might still try to have him murdered, Mithridates had also developed an obsessive interest in toxicology, taking repeated antidotes until he was immune to poison. Not the kind of boy, in short, to let family stand in the way of a throne. Duly returning to his capital at the head of a conquering army, Mithridates had ordered his mother killed, and then, just for good measure, his brother and sister too. More than twenty years later he remained as power hungry and ruthless as ever – far too much so, certainly, for a reluctant Roman poodle. The invasion was contemptuously repelled.