Cleopatra and Antony (6 page)

Cato opposed a bill put forward by Crassus to secure revisions to the terms under which cronies of the latter had purchased the right to gather (or “farm”) the taxes in Asia, since they had clearly overestimated the take and wanted the government to recompense them for their own error. While morally correct, as on so many other occasions Cato could have acted less bluntly to minimize offense, as Cicero realized: “As for our dear friend Cato, the fact remains that with all his patriotism he can be a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as if he were living in Plato’s ‘Republic’ instead of Romulus’s cesspit.”

Caesar’s clash with the Senate occurred when he returned from Spain in 60 to seek the consulship. Because he had won some military victories in what is now Portugal, he had been awarded a Triumph. By tradition, until he celebrated his Triumph a general was still considered under arms, and a general under arms could not enter Rome. The consular elections would take place before his Triumph could be arranged. Caesar therefore sought permission to stand for consul by proxy—a request that his implacable foe Cato took pleasure in persuading the Senate to refuse. Caesar forwent his Triumph to stand for the consulship, which he won handsomely.

Previously, it had been considered almost a law of nature that Crassus and Pompey were irreconcilable rivals but now, each thwarted and slighted by the conservative faction in the Senate led by Cato, they combined forces. It is a measure of Caesar’s rapidly rising stature that he promoted this unlikely alliance and joined these two giants of the age in their secret coalition. Soon to be made public, it has become known to historians as the First Triumvirate although it had no legal status. The participants simply agreed to undertake no action detrimental to the others. Nevertheless they, not the Senate, had effective control of Rome.

To cement his place in these new arrangements, Caesar offered the hand of his twenty-four-year-old daughter Julia to Pompey, who accepted with alacrity. Cato condemned Caesar as no better than a pimp to his own daughter, trading her honor for political capital. When Caesar in turn married Calpurnia, the daughter of Piso, the Triumvirate’s favored consular candidate for the year after Caesar’s tenure of that office, Cato fulminated, “It was intolerable for marriage to be the coin by which leadership of the state was bought and sold and for women to be the means by which men slotted one another into provincial governorships, military commands and the control of resources.” Cicero wrote of Caesar’s new father-in-law that “talking with him is much the same as holding a discussion with a wooden post in the forum . . . a dull and brutish clod . . . profligate, filthy and intemperate.”

With Caesar as consul, a bill was passed granting undeserved rebates to Crassus’ tax farmers. Caesar next introduced a law to grant the land his son-in-law Pompey had requested for his veterans. It was opposed, as usual, by Cato and by Caesar’s fellow consul for the year, a somewhat ineffectual man called Bibulus, whose election the conservatives had secured by bribery. Caesar, always impatient of dissent, became so enraged by Cato’s filibustering tactics in the Senate—a body that had to adjourn its sessions before the early spring sundown—that he foolishly ordered him to be seized and taken off to jail. Several senators made to accompany him, loudly asserting their preference to be in jail with Cato rather than in the Senate with Caesar. Realizing that for the present he had overreached himself, Caesar released Cato.

Determined to have his way, however illegally, in the face of further stalling tactics from both Cato and Bibulus, Caesar with Pompey organized gangs of the latter’s veterans who roamed Rome’s streets intimidating their opponents whatever their rank. Bibulus had already angered Caesar, issuing edicts describing him as “the queen of Bithynia who once wanted to sleep with a monarch but now wants to be one.” When Bibulus tried to postpone another vote on the grounds that he saw inauspicious omens in the sky, Pompey’s veterans moved in. They emptied a basketful of dung over Bibulus’ head. As he struggled to wipe it off, the veterans smashed the fasces—the bundle of twelve 5-foot-long birch rods tied together with a red leather thong and with an axe in their middle that represented the consular power or
imperium
—and beat up the lictors, his official bodyguards. Recovering himself, Bibulus bared his neck for execution, ready to die and to call down vengeance on Caesar. But Caesar was bent on humiliation, not execution. Bibulus’ friends hurried him off, leaving the way clear for Caesar, after this display of brute force, to have the intimidated Senate vote through the land law.

At the end of his consular year, after further political chicanery, Caesar was granted the governorship of Roman (Transalpine) Gaul for an unprecedented five-year period. He had obtained what he wanted—in the words of the contemporary historian Sallust, “a high command, an army and a war in some field where his gifts could shine in all their brightness.” Before departing, Caesar struck up an unexpected alliance with Clodius, the man who had disturbed the rites of the Good Goddess.

Clodius had noted the success of Pompey’s veterans in forcing through laws in their favor. He gathered his own thugs around him and began to deploy them to further his own political ambitions by intimidating his opponents. The word
fascist
derives from the Roman
fasces
and many have seen parallels between the use of premeditated mob violence by Caesar, Clodius and their contemporaries to subvert weak but legal governments and the actions of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s. Such gangs were certainly an increasingly destabilizing factor in the republic’s latter days. Caesar secured Clodius’ election to a tribuneship further to increase the aspiring demagogue’s patronage and influence with the people—both of which he would be sure to use on his own new patron’s behalf.
*

Within three months and even before Caesar’s departure, Clodius forced Cicero into voluntary exile. The orator was not physically a particularly brave man and had been constantly harassed by Clodius’ gangs throwing dung and insults and threatening him with trial for irregularities in connection with the execution of the Catiline conspirators. Around this time too, Clodius, with triumviral backing, organized the annexation of the Ptolemaic possession of Cyprus—the act that sparked the Alexandrian mob to chase Auletes from his throne—to replenish Rome’s depleted coffers. He also orchestrated the appointment by the cowed Senate of Cato to oversee the annexation as a device to get him out of Rome. Caesar himself, having demonstrated his resolution to secure his own ends however far he needed to go in “persuading” the Senate, soon left for Gaul, where he was to spend, in total, nine years.

Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, undertaken without the formal authorization of the Senate, is well documented in his own book
De Bello Gallico
. Although it is designed as political propaganda for himself (it is written in the third person and the name Caesar appears more than 770 times), Caesar was always clear and usually fair, admitting his mistakes and praising the deeds of his juniors. Caesar’s clarity is summed up by this advice to other writers: “Avoid an unfamiliar word as a sailor avoids the rocks.” However, the format of Roman books would make them anything but clear to modern readers. They were written on papyrus rolls up to thirty feet long and the texts had no punctuation, no paragraphs, no spaces between words and no capital letters.

Caesar’s first success was to repulse the Helvetii who invaded the Rhone Valley. He next headed north, marching and fighting through the winter to reach the North Sea. One of his subordinates, Crassus’ young son Publius, subdued the west of Gaul, and Caesar gloried in his report to the Senate that he had brought peace and Roman rule to the whole of the country. Back in Rome everyone rejoiced. Cicero, newly returned from exile, led the praise, “Regions and nations unreported to us in books, or in first-hand accounts, or even by rumors, have now been penetrated by our general, our army and the arms of the Roman people.”

Auletes, then a humble supplicant in Rome, must have hoped that some of those arms and armies might soon be put at his disposal to help him regain his throne but, as so often in Egypt’s relationship with Rome, internal Roman politics once again took precedence over the pleadings of kings. He and Cleopatra would have to wait.

*Allowing women to recline on couches was a daring (some said decadent) innovation. Previously they had had to sit demurely on stools or chairs.

*The Romans relished soft, squishy meats and sows’ udders are a frequently mentioned delicacy, as are sows’ vulvas and wombs. Plutarch recorded that the best sows’ wombs were obtained by jumping on the sow when she was heavily pregnant to bring on a miscarriage. Udders too, he related, were at their finest after this revolting treatment. To consume these delicacies, diners used knife, spoon and mostly fingers (forks were unknown until the fourteenth century AD).

*Pontifex maximus means “chief bridge builder”—in early times the chief priest had had responsibility for the all important Tiber Bridge. The title was subsequently appropriated in turn by the Roman emperors and by the Pope.

*Cato was not only the antithesis of Caesar politically. Unlike the dandy Caesar, he deliberately dressed in black rather than the then fashionable purple and, to emphasize his contempt for comfort and luxury, walked everywhere, sometimes barefoot.

*Although Roman leaders of the period in practice achieved much by illegitimate and violent means, like many recent dictators—and unlike rulers of medieval times—they almost invariably sought the appearance of legitimacy by standing for office in elections, although electors were too afraid to vote for any other candidate, if indeed other candidates were prepared to stand. Similarly, they took care to have their decisions approved within preexisting but subverted power structures such as the Senate.

CHAPTER 5

Like Caesar, Pompey was highly conscious of his
dignitas
—a word that embraces not only our concept of dignity but also those of status, honor and self-esteem. Such a public display of disrespect was entirely too much for him. Goaded into action, he sponsored another tribune, Milo, to recruit gangsters of his own to oppose Clodius. Rome had no police force. The army was not permitted to enter the city. Gang warfare therefore escalated unchecked: “The Tiber was full of bodies, the public sewers choked with them and the blood streaming from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges.” Slowly Pompey began to exert himself. Among his first actions was to secure Caesar’s consent to Cicero’s return, hence the latter’s paean to the Gallic conqueror.

Clodius in turn sought the support of his long-term financier Crassus, who, still keen to keep Pompey in his place, backed him. In consequence, feelings between the two triumvirs became so intense that Pompey told Cicero that Crassus had been behind Clodius’ plots all along and wanted to have him killed.

The triumvirate appeared doomed but then, unexpectedly, in spring 56 Crassus and Pompey made peace at a summit meeting brokered by Caesar in Lucca. The upshot was that Crassus and Pompey would become consuls again in 55—the year Antony stormed Pelusium and opened the road for Auletes to return to Alexandria.

It soon emerged what else had been in the reconciliation for Crassus and Pompey, and also for Caesar. After their consulships, Crassus would take a five-year command in Syria and Pompey a similarly lucrative period in Spain. Caesar would get another five years to carry on his work in Gaul. Crassus was intent not just on ruling Syria but, having jealously mocked Pompey’s Alexandrian pretensions, now wished to outdo him by conquering the only remaining eastern superpower, the Parthians (the rulers of Persia), before marching further east toward India, just as Alexander had done, heaping the Roman people and, more importantly, himself with glory and loot.

Crassus crossed the Euphrates in the spring of 53 and headed out into the sandy Mesopotamian wastes. Drawn ever onward, deeper into this wilderness, pursuing the shapes of Parthian horsemen on the shimmering horizon, Crassus’ splendid legions became increasingly exhausted. Then, not far from a town named Carrhae, the Parthian army materialized through the haze. Attacked by armored heavy cavalry and bewildered by the famous Parthian shot—clouds of arrows fired by mounted archers who wheeled away as they delivered their deadly volleys—the Roman soldiers began to die where they stood in their defensive formations. As the casualties mounted, the lines started to break. The parched legionaries tried to close up into a smaller perimeter, but to no avail. A few, maintaining their discipline, managed eventually to fight their way back to the frontier. Ten thousand became prisoners but twenty thousand died in the gritty desert sands, among them Crassus and his son Publius, who had fought so well with Caesar in Gaul. Crassus’ head was taken to the Parthian king, who ordered it to be deployed as a stage prop in a production of Euripides’
Bacchae
that he happened to be watching at the time.

Crassus had failed even to equal his rival Pompey’s exploits, let alone those of the legendary Alexander. It would be twenty more years before another Roman triumvir—Antony—crossed into the desert to avenge Crassus and attempt to relive Alexander’s dream. This time he would be financed by one of the great Macedonian’s distant descendants—Cleopatra.

Antony had joined Caesar in Gaul following his success in helping restore Auletes to the Egyptian throne. He was among Caesar’s commanders at his last great battle in Gaul at Alesia, near present-day Dijon, where Caesar besieged Vercingetorix in his hilltop fortress. Told by his scouts that a massive relieving army of Gauls was, in turn, about to attack him in the rear, Caesar ordered some of his heavily outnumbered legionaries to about-face and build ramparts at the Roman army’s rear to allow the battle to be joined on two sides. Antony was in the thick of the four days of hard fighting. In his
Gallic Wars
Caesar praised his young commander in particular for his calmness and leadership during a nighttime attack by the Gauls, when Antony and another officer skillfully moved legionaries around their defensive perimeter to reinforce weak points and successfully held off the Gauls.

Throughout the battle the red-cloaked Caesar was himself visible everywhere, encouraging his troops until, when he believed his opponents exhausted, he ordered his cavalry to charge. The weight and ferocity of their attack routed his besiegers. Those Gauls who could fled. Those inside the fortress who could not surrendered, including Vercingetorix. Caesar had now finally subdued Gaul, killing, so he calculated, nearly 1.2 million Gauls in battle, to say nothing of the numbers of civilians killed, dispossessed or enslaved with his many prisoners of war. As a result of his efforts, Rome was no longer solely a Mediterranean power. Its legions now also guarded the Atlantic and the North Sea; its merchants and traders had even greater dominions from which to profit.

Cato now put forward as his favored candidate in the much-postponed consular elections Milo, Pompey’s former henchman, who had long since fallen from Pompey’s favor. Pompey was not amused and neither was Clodius, Milo’s long-standing adversary. Clodius, under the guidance of his strong-minded, politically astute wife, Fulvia—who would one day marry Antony and be an equally forceful presence in his life—had, under Caesar’s patronage, been attempting to become a mainstream politician. Both outraged and threatened by Milo’s candidature, he returned, probably with relish, to his street-fighting past.

Yelling and heavily armed mobs rampaged through Rome’s streets once more. Then, in January 52, the two gang leaders and their gangs clashed on the Appian Way. A javelin wounded Clodius in the shoulder, and his supporters carried him bleeding into a neighboring inn. Milo’s men rushed in after them, dragged Clodius out and lynched him.

Fulvia, instead of collapsing into paroxysms of grief, had her husband’s mangled and naked body retrieved from where it was lying in the street—ironically, next to an altar of the Good Goddess—and coolly orchestrated revenge. First she summoned more of Clodius’ supporters from the slums. Then, when they arrived, she exhibited her husband’s body to them in the lobby of her house. Carefully and dramatically, she revealed his wounds one by one as the onlookers’ indignation rose. The next day, with her encouragement, the mob transported Clodius’ corpse to the Senate, where they cremated it using the furniture and papers as makeshift fuel for the pyre, which consumed the Senate building as well as Clodius’ remains. Rival gangs fought among the flames. Every respectable Roman leader was appalled. Even Cato turned to Pompey to rescue the republic from mob rule. Pompey answered the call of duty with alacrity, speedily restoring order, and Milo was exiled. Basking in the glory and respect he had always thought his due, Pompey remarried. He did not accept Caesar’s offer of his seventeen-year-old great-niece Octavia—thirty-seven years Pompey’s junior and another future wife of Antony—but instead took the hand of the beautiful and highly patrician Cornelia, the young widow of Crassus’ son Publius. Pompey was now moving toward the republican faction and away from Caesar and the popular party but, again enraptured by the charms of a young wife, he did not act decisively.

It was Caesar who took the lead by seeking to extend his command in Gaul until he could once more legally stand for the consulship in 48. The hard-line republicans and traditionalists such as Cato opposed the proposal, suspecting that Caesar merely wanted to preserve his armies intact and himself, as an officeholder, immune from prosecution by his enemies for exceeding his authority until after winning the consulship, when, with his veterans at his elbow, he could ram through legislation augmenting his own powers and rewarding his loyal followers. Pompey procrastinated, unwilling to abandon Caesar entirely, but in the end he came down in favor of the Senate, reassuring his new followers grandiloquently that if Caesar intervened militarily, “I only have to stamp my foot and all over Italy legions and cavalry will rise from the ground.”

Tensions rose further in what Cicero called “a struggle for personal power at the state’s expense” as Caesar maneuvered to bolster his position. Although still in Gaul, he secured a strong man to represent him in Rome: Antony. Under Caesar’s patronage, Antony was elected tribune. In the face of the hostility of most of the Senate he displayed not only the physical courage he had shown previously but also a fiery oratory in defending Caesar and virulently attacking Pompey. In January 49, using the powers of the tribunes, restored after Sulla’s death, Antony vetoed a Senate bill that ordered Caesar to surrender his command or be outlawed as an enemy of the people. The Senate’s response was to eject Antony from their midst and threaten him with death if he returned, as well as to grant Pompey emergency powers. Antony and some other of Caesar’s supporters disguised themselves as slaves and, hiding in the backs of carts, fled toward northern Italy, where Caesar, encamped with a single legion, was awaiting the outcome of the Senate vote.

Before Antony could reach him, Caesar heard reports of what had happened in Rome and realized that he had to act decisively, albeit unconstitutionally, if he was to win power or indeed, in all probability, preserve his life. On January 10, 49, his legion crossed the cold waters of the river Rubicon in the Apennines, which formally marked the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul, one of the provinces Caesar commanded, and Rome. Caesar’s laconic comment “Let the dice fly high,” made as he gave the order to advance, shows that he knew the gamble he was taking. In marching out of his province in arms toward Rome he was committing treason, breaking one of Sulla’s laws that had not been overturned.

Antony joined Caesar at Rimini. Having taken the irrevocable step, Caesar advanced quickly on Rome. The Senate remained suspicious of Pompey and refused to grant him all the freedoms he required to marshal an effective resistance. Thus Pompey took a decision that was sound militarily but disastrous politically. He abandoned Rome, proclaiming that any senator or official who remained was a traitor. Caesar cleverly responded that he, on the other hand, would consider any who were not openly against him as with him.

Pompey retreated swiftly south and, only sixty-five days after Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, Pompey and his troops left Italy for Greece. Pompey was convinced that his best chance of success lay in exploiting the riches and resources of the East, where he had enjoyed so many triumphs and had so many supporters, including, he believed, the Ptolemies. Caesar, who pursued Pom-pey pell-mell to his departure port of Brundisium and nearly succeeded in blocking the embarkation of the republicans, decided against immediate pursuit since his was the inferior navy. Instead, he determined to cross to Spain to defeat Pompey’s supporters in the provinces, where Pompey had so long been absentee governor. Before departing he appointed Antony as his governor in Italy. That he did so demonstrated trust not only in Antony’s political and military judgment but also in his loyalty—a trust that was not misplaced.

Caesar soon defeated Pompey’s followers and, satisfied that he need no longer fear attack from the rear, returned to Italy. Here too the situation had remained sufficiently calm under Antony’s rule for Caesar to feel confident in 48 to cross the Adriatic and face Pompey himself.

This time Caesar entrusted Antony with a military role—to bring five legions of reinforcements across the Adriatic to back up his initial landings. It took Antony three months to get the troops across, because of storms and the activities of the powerful republican navy under Caesar’s old foe Bibulus. Caesar’s forces were in a perilous situation until Antony and his troops arrived, but once they did, the combined force began to advance. Nevertheless, their first attempt to surround and destroy Pompey’s troops, at their main base at Dyrrhachium on what is now the Albanian coast, ended in a serious setback. Caesar himself admitted that Pompey should have won “total victory if only he knew how to be a winner.” Undaunted, a few weeks later, in the hot, high summer of 48, Caesar offered battle to Pompey and the squabbling forces of the republic further inland on the plains of Thessaly at Pharsalus.