A History of the World (24 page)

Once Carthage had gone, Rome could turn on the Greek states that had inherited Alexander’s world, on Macedonia, and the Seleucid empire, which ran from present-day Turkey to the steppes. As a
system of powerful military empires, the Greek world was starting to collapse. In its ideas about beauty, philosophy, the arts and mathematics it would have a very long half-life, almost as the conscience of the Roman world. Some of its greatest thinkers and inventions were yet to be born. But it is from the fall of Carthage and the Greek kingdoms to the Roman legions that we can date the real beginning of the imperial Roman world.

Money and Politics

Why? Because the Roman republic, with its boasted austerity and virtue, its all-in-this-together patriotism, could not survive its own success. The plunder that began to pour in, and would arrive in ever greater quantities, corrupted its political system. A sudden new source of wealth tends to corrupt any political settlement. The Roman system of taxation and spending was rackety, to say the least. The wars allowed massive personal fortunes to be accumulated over which the state had virtually no control. It is estimated that rich Romans were, for instance, about twice as rich as the wealthiest Han Chinese aristocrats. To start with, the poor were bought off with subsidized food and public entertainment. By 167
BC
, direct taxes on Roman citizens went altogether, replaced by ‘tribute’ from Sicily, Greece, Spain and Africa.

Roman magistrates sent out to govern the equivalent in acreage of New South Wales were allowed to enrich themselves, returning wealthy enough to bribe and organize their way to greater power at home. Corruption became endemic in the politics of the city. Yet the poor, still paying indirect taxes, had a hard time of it. As the super-rich bought up farms and ran them with slaves, the peasants who had once been seen as the backbone of Roman virtue were displaced and sent jobless to the city. In this period we learn of a new disease,
luxuria
, or decadence, or simply ‘too much’. The long decades of constant fighting, and the arrival of ever more captives, cowed allies and slaves, resulted in the Roman armies ceasing to be militias of citizens serving their time and becoming semi-independent and dangerous bodies.

Class war began to brew. On the one hand, the new decadence was horrifying Roman moralists. Greek homosexuality seems to have
become more acceptable and the price of boy lovers rocketed. Gladiatorial fights had always been popular in Rome – they went back to Etruscan models – but now the ‘games’ became ever more lavish, featuring exotic animals and fighters, as rich office-seekers tried to buy popularity. Yet at the same time, hordes of displaced peasants and city workers struggling to live, the easily mobilized mobs of Roman politics, crowded the streets. Radical orators, most famously the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, called for land reform and the cleaning-up of the political scene. Both were murdered in an orgy of violence, which started to sweep through Rome. Members of the aristocratic Senate seethed at the possibility of reform, though they were divided on the issue; eventually a military hard man, Sulla, took Rome to the edge of civil war before making himself dictator and increasing the powers of the senators and the army.

It is a sequence familiar in the capitals of other great empires: the extreme inequality created as loot from abroad pours in; the corruption of voting systems and of representative institutions; hoarse cries for change from the streets; the undertow of violence; the mailed fist as the army strides in to ‘clean things up’. The imbalance of power created by empire, unbalances the empire itself. Roman life spun out of order, out of all control. Senators continued to act as if they were living in the old republic, speechifying and plotting. But the armies could no longer be trusted and social unrest worsened. The huge slave revolt begun by the gladiator Spartacus in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius shook this slave society to its core. His 70,000-strong force of former gladiators and farmers defeated two armies in the year 71
BC
. (They would finally be crushed by the combined forces of most of Rome’s available military power.) There was a rebel consul loose in Spain, and more trouble in Asia. But worse than all of this were the measures that had to be taken to restore order.

Returned from the east, Pompey was back in town – or rather, just outside Rome, waiting with his legions. The old Roman custom had been to award victorious generals a ‘triumph’, a processional parade through the city. The victor would ride in his chariot, a slave behind him reminding him that he was mortal. In front would be led his captives in chains, and perhaps some booty from the war. As Rome’s reach and appetite had grown, these triumphs had become more lavish and extreme, days of riotous civic partying. Pompey was
awarded an unheard-of three triumphs, the last of which featured a jaw-dropping caravan of strange animals, glistening loot, defeated kings and priests, soldiers and money.

As it turned out, Pompey did not prove an adroit enough politician to seize power in quite the way his critics had feared. But there were now two other military aristocrats and super-rich rivals at large. Crassus, a thuggish soldier, was now a plutocrat, who in a hideous display of revenge after the Spartacus war had crucified on the main road north to Rome some six thousand captured rebels. The other was Julius Caesar.

Caesar is the most famous Roman, who gave us our calendars – indeed, our modern way of measuring time – and whose assassination is the climactic scene of Roman political life. Though hindsight is blinding and we must rely on Caesar-struck historians, it seems that he was extraordinary from an early age. A top-notch aristocratic youth allied to the wrong side, he had survived the murderous dictatorship of Sulla, when lists of those to be judicially murdered had been pasted up in the Forum. He became a soldier while still in his teens and made a name for himself, not least by taking revenge on pirates who had kidnapped him and then foolishly let him go. He zigzagged, double-crossed and bought his way upwards through the dangerous world of Roman politics, taking one position after another and paying for lavish games, until he finally reached what should have been the top, the consulship, in 59
BC
. Caesar then plotted to bypass the Senate, using the money and connections of Crassus and Pompey to help fix a lucrative military command for himself afterwards. The greatest Roman orator, Cicero, who had thought he was playing Caesar along, was entirely outsmarted. Caesar got his way, evaded his many enemies, and began years of fighting beyond the Alps, slaughtering Gaulish and German tribes and reaching Britain, though not staying there very long.

Caesar knew that the route to power in Rome came from a combination of fame, of a kind only won on the battlefield, and great wealth, also best won by conquest. His campaigns abroad were also campaigns for power at home. As he fought – and he was a brilliant general – he wrote crisply propagandistic accounts of his campaigns so as to burnish his image. In them he reveals clear military thinking, an ability to bounce back from reverses, a close, if cold, attention to the
habits and foibles of the enemy tribes, and an acute sense of his own mythology. What Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
do not properly explain is that he was engaged in destroying another civilization in order to improve his own position. This was not genocide, since he was prepared to do deals with tribes that knuckled under, and was interested in gathering slaves as well as mounds of corpses; but it
was
culturecide.

The Celts built mainly with wood. They had an oral culture, not a written one. Archaeological surveys during the latter part of the twentieth century suggest they were far more successful than once thought. They built roads, and possibly earlier than the Romans had. Celtic roads were often built across boggy land and forests, and were of oak bound together, so they have mostly vanished, except for fragments found in Ireland, Wales and Germany. Caesar would devote himself to reforming his calendar, but the Celtic calendar is argued by some to have been more accurate: the bronze find known as the Coligny Calendar is certainly sophisticated. Some Celtic historians argue that they had considerable urban centres, which we tend to call ‘tribal forts’ rather than ‘towns’ because we have swallowed Roman propaganda. Roman historians disagree, considering this an exaggeration. Some Celtic towns were round, while others in the south had long stone walls. Gaulish houses were certainly more than huts: they could have two storeys, and even courtyards. The Gauls seem to have had a system of counting populations.
¹⁶

The Gauls mined gold and silver, produced their own worked gold ornaments, as complicated and heart-wrenchingly beautiful as any object made by Roman hands. They fought with sophisticated tactics – their chariots and large shields particularly impressed the Romans – and used iron ploughs and threshing-machines that were better than those most Roman farmers had. True, they were organized into archaic tribal groupings – but then so had the Latins been, until fairly recently. The Romans made much of their Druids’ dreadful habit of burning people alive in wicker baskets to appease the gods, and their head-hunting, and these practices were regrettable; but the rebel-crucifying Romans, addicted as they were to blood-soaked arenas, were hardly in a position of high moral authority.

Some Gauls, at least, were well travelled, serving in Greek and Egyptian armies and settling in those lands, too. Their women had greater freedoms than Roman women, including complex divorce
rights if they were ill-treated. Unlike Roman women, some may have risen to become leaders, and the revolt of Queen Boudicca certainly suggests this; there are also richly ornate female graves in France and Germany. Rather like native Americans, they showed a deep thirst for booze sold to them by Greeks and Romans, though this was wine rather than whisky: it appears to have been a welcome novelty for drinkers of wheat beer. Of their poems and music we know next to nothing. Unlike the Carthaginians, however, they were always likely to be defeated. What they lacked was the civic system, the sheer organizational reach, of the Roman world. In a fight between a nation and tribes, the nation will win.

Caesar’s destruction of Gaulish culture involved not only the deaths in battle of more than a million people – 1.2 million according to his own bland accountancy – but also the starvation or taking into slavery of roughly the same number. This suggests that up to one in three people in Gaul disappeared, a slaughter rate that rivals the worst butchers of the twentieth century. To put it another way, Caesar had proportionately a similar effect to the Black Death, which killed between 30 per cent of people in the Middle East and anywhere between 30 and 60 per cent of Europeans. Unlike the bacterium
Yersinia pestis
, however, or the rat fleas that carried it, Caesar was mainly concerned with his own political career. The victories and his accounts of them, followed by processions of slaves and loot, built him an ever-growing popular reputation in Rome, while his personal wealth grew fatter. In effect, he had made himself warlord over a huge slab of Europe.
¹⁷
When the time came for renewing his position he struck a cynical deal with Pompey and Crassus, sharing the spoils in return for a further extension of his murderous but highly profitable rule. When he responded to the deaths of seventy Romans in an attack by German tribesmen by killing some 430,000 men, women and children, even some Romans, such as Cato, were disgusted.

By the time Caesar was ready to return, he had the money, the army and the popular reputation to permit him to do almost anything. His frightened enemies saw him as the enemy of the Senate, of the old order and indeed of the Roman republican constitution. Against that constitution he was forming an alliance of people ready to be bribed and entertained, individuals who saw him as an essential and successful new leader; and he was readying his legions. Caesar’s only problem
now was that, if he returned after his command was formally over, he could be prosecuted for his behaviour as consul so many years before. He could not be sure that he would not be found guilty and killed.

So he crossed the small river that separated his command from Roman territory, the Rubicon, and marched on Rome itself. If the constitution threatened him, he would destroy the constitution. Pompey, slow to grasp quite what a threat Caesar had become, declared himself a defender of the Senate. Then, along with many senators, he fled Rome to fight elsewhere. Caesar arrived in the city to claim his stolen inheritance; the people were well primed for the mass bribery that followed, and his relatives arguing his case. It was touch-and-go – paying off the legions was more difficult than expected – but enough of his enemies had fled into exile with Pompey and others to allow him to impose himself on the city. On the corpses of Celts and on the silence of empty villages Caesar had now raised as his political monument the death of Rome’s once proud republican tradition.

‘Caesarism’ has become a bad word in politics, and for the best of reasons.

Cleopatra and Caesar: A Story of Failure

To try to see Cleopatra plainly we have to squint and shade our eyes – to squint past the splash of poetry and the flash of movies, past the Shakespeare and the Hollywood, past the lip-smacking Roman rumours and the erotic Victorian paintings. She was no vamp, no saucy baggage. She was a brilliant politician. She was a tough and wily Greek ruler trying to manipulate power as the Roman republic collapsed, not a pleasure-seeker with alluring eyeliner. Her life was a constant struggle to reverse the collapsing fortunes of one of the Mediterranean’s great powers, Ptolemaic Egypt. And she was one of classical history’s great losers. With her death, an empire dating back to Alexander the Great vanished, as did the rule of the pharaohs.

This is a story of civil war as much as it is a love story. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323
BC
, aged only thirty-three, his generals had fought over the many scraps that remained of his conquests. Hopes of a great Greek empire – greater than the Roman one that succeeded it – finally died with Antigonus the One-eyed, who had served
Alexander’s father in their little Balkan state of Macedon, and whose fight to preserve his son’s legacy ended when he was killed in battle at the age of eighty. Among the kingdoms that emerged was Egypt, ruled by Cleopatra’s ancestor, Ptolemy Soter.