The Book of Ancient Bastards (10 page)

That’s
Superbus
, Not
Superb

(REIGNED 535–509 B.C.)

By this blood, most chaste until a prince wronged it, I swear, and I take you, gods, to witness, that I will pursue Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and his wicked wife and all his children, with sword, with fire, aye with whatsoever violence I may; and that I will suffer neither them nor any other to be king in Rome!
—Lucius Junius Brutus (attributed by the Roman historian Livy)

Tarquin the Proud (“Superbus” is Latin for “proud” or “haughty”), also known as Tarquin the Cruel, was the seventh and final king of Rome. Supposedly descended both from a noble Etruscan (modern-day Tuscany) and a Greek adventurer from Corinth, Tarquin was also, according to the Roman historian and propagandist Livy, a tyrant who ruled without either seeking or taking the advice of the Roman senate, a vicious, bloodthirsty conqueror who ordered up wholesale slaughter, and a murderer who conspired with his sister-in-law Tullia to kill his brother (her husband) and his own wife (her sister), then eventually the king (her father!)

Once Tarquin and Tullia had gotten rid of brother, sister, and father (namely anyone who could stand in their way of ruling Rome), they set about consolidating their power. The Etruscan kings who ruled before Tarquin are supposed to have been smart enough to listen to Rome’s “advisory council” called the “senate,” and thus have given at least the illusion that they gave a fig for what “the people” thought about how they were governed.

Not so Tarquin. He set himself up as an autocrat, ignoring the senate and ruling through military might alone. He was reputed to be a great conqueror, in addition to being a thief who stole both his wife and his throne through political murder.

When Tarquin’s son Sextus raped a virtuous Roman matron named Lucretia, it was the beginning of the end. Lucretia denounced Sextus as a rapist in front of every male relative she had, then stabbed herself to death.

One of her relatives took up her dagger and vowed on the spot to raise a rebellion to drive the oppressive Tarquins out. The populace rose in response, and Tarquin and his family fled Rome, never to return. He died in exile a few years later, still fighting to retake the city he’d lost. Rome’s leading citizens convinced the people to forego kings, and to found a republic instead.

And that relative of Lucretia’s who vowed to finish what she’d started? Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the Roman Republic’s founders and first consuls and the ancestor of fellow Roman bastard (and assassin of Julius Caesar) Marcus Junius Brutus.

Of course how much of this whole story is actually true is debatable. After all, Livy was as much a propagandist as he was an historian, and he’s pretty much the only source we have for the period of Rome’s founding.

Historical bastard.

Poppy-Slaying Bastard

Livy tells the story of how Tarquin covertly conveyed his wishes to the son who had recently gained control of Gabii, a neighboring town, as to what Tarquin wanted him to do next in order to secure the hold of the Tarquin family on this new real estate:

“Tarquin, I suppose, was not sure of the messenger’s good faith: in any case, he said not a word in reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air went out into the garden. The man followed him, and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence, began knocking off poppy-heads with his stick. The messenger at last wearied of putting his question and waiting for the reply, so he returned to Gabii supposing his mission to have failed.” On hearing of how Tarquin had responded by lopping off poppy heads with his stick, his son Sextus Tarquinius understood Tarquin’s meaning all too well, and in response heads began to roll in Gabii. It was one of the first such bloodbaths in Roman history. There would be many to follow.

Elephants and Siege Engines Just the Tip of the Iceberg

(248–182 B.C.)

I swear so soon as age will permit . . . I will use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome.
—Hannibal of Carthage

Hannibal, the great nemesis of Rome, the Carthaginian general whose father forced him to swear the oath excerpted above, who went on to ravage Italy for twenty years, trying to take the city of Rome. Hannibal, whose name Roman matrons used as a proto-bogeyman to frighten their children into doing their chores and saying their prayers. Hannibal, who made good on his promise and fought Rome to a standstill for a generation.

Hannibal, the son of a great general, was raised to think strategically and to hate Rome reflexively. His home city of Carthage (originally a Phoenician colony) on the North African coast in what is now Tunisia had lost part of its far-flung trading empire to the Roman Republic during the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), and Hannibal burned with a desire to make the Romans pay.

In 218 B.C., Hannibal took an army from Carthage’s colonies in Spain through southern France and across the Alps, into Italy, where he intended to sack the city of Rome itself. The logistical problem for Hannibal was that most of the terrifying war elephants he’d brought with him from Africa died during the passage through the Alps, and he’d also been forced to leave most of his siege engines behind. Without them, he would never be able to successfully besiege Rome. And since the Romans controlled the seas, Hannibal could expect little in the way of supplies and reinforcements from Carthage, either.

So he lived off the land, looting and pillaging his way up and down Italy for years, then for decades, defeating the Romans in battle after battle, but unable to either draw them into a climactic battle in the open or breach Rome’s thick city walls. And the more Hannibal raided their farms to supply his army, the less likely Rome’s allied cities in Italy were to go over to Hannibal’s side in this war. He literally could neither lose, nor win.

Hannibal was eventually drawn back to Carthage and the climactic battle he craved was his at Zama in 202 B.C.

He lost. In the resulting peace, Carthage, was stripped of all of her overseas territories and reduced to a barely independent shadow of her former self. Hannibal went on the run, hiring out as a mercenary general among the Greek kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean, continuing to fight Rome. His efforts came to naught. With the Romans closing in on him, and determined not to be dragged back to Rome in chains, Hannibal committed suicide in 182 B.C.

Sometimes a Bridge Is More Than The Sum of Its Parts

At one point in his back-and-forth struggle with Rome, Hannibal became so angry at what he considered Roman intransigence and duplicity that, according to the historian Appian, he “sold some of his prisoners, put others to death, and made a bridge of their bodies with which he passed over a stream. The senators and other distinguished prisoners in his hands he compelled to fight with each other, as a spectacle for the Africans, fathers against sons, and brothers against brothers. He omitted no act of disdainful cruelty.”

The Man Who Killed the Roman Republic

(157–86 B.C.)

The law speaks too softly to be heard amidst the din of arms.
—Gaius Marius

Gaius Marius was by any measure an incredibly successful fellow: transcending a humble birth in the Italian countryside to rise to the pinnacle of power in the Roman world, he was the only man to ever hold the consulship an unheard-of seven times. He was also a ruthless bastard who exploited his series of elected government positions to enrich himself and enacted laws that turned the Roman legions into a professional fighting force and made them completely dependent on the generals who commanded them. In Marius’s army reforms lay the seeds of the Republic’s inevitable destruction.

Incredibly ambitious, Marius wanted to establish himself as a permanent player in Roman power politics. In order to do that he needed three things: money, respectability, and influence. His career in public office combined with several successful military commands easily earned him the first two.

But wealth and respectability were of little consequence without influence. In 110 B.C., he got it the old-fashioned way: he bought it. He cut a deal with a proud-but-poor patrician family with impeccable blood lines, the Julii. Marius married one of their daughters and in return they got access to his considerable fortune.

Once he became consul, Marius prepared to put down the ongoing rebellion of a former Roman ally in North Africa named Jugurtha. In order to do this, he needed troops. The problem for the new consul was that the Republic’s legions were all tied down fighting barbarians along the northern frontiers and Greeks in the east.

So Marius began to recruit from a new source: the poor.

Previously all Roman legionaries had been recruited from among land-owning peasants, people wealthy enough to provide their own armor and weapons. But these citizen soldiers were in short supply, so Marius made another deal. If the landless citizens who crowded into Rome’s cities agreed to serve in the army, the Republic would not only feed, clothe, and pay them, it would also train them and supply their armor and weapons.

With this move, Marius created the famous “Marius’s Mules”: professional soldiers able to carry everything they needed on their backs wherever they went. It was a stroke of genius. Jugurtha’s rebellion was crushed, and Marius’s hold on power secured.

But this masterstroke had unintended consequences. Because their generals saw to their needs, even ensuring that they received a grant of public land for a farm of their own once they had served in the army for twenty years, Roman legionaries began giving their allegiance to their commanders first and to the Republic second.

New Bastard?

Marius was a novus homo (Latin for “new man”), someone born as a commoner who became a member of the nobility upon serving a term as consul (one of two chief executives of the Republic, who led the armies in battle and executed the laws made by the senate, in much the way a modern-day president does), which he did for the first time in 106 B.C.

Combined with the political ambitions of numerous wealthy aristocrats, all looking to make names for themselves and outdo each other, the Marian military reforms had the net effect of weakening the Republic’s already shaky foundation. Marius himself spent the next twenty years in and out of power, intriguing along with the others until his sudden death at age seventy shortly after being elected to his seventh term as consul.

Ironically enough, it was the great man’s own nephew who finished what he’d started with his military reforms. His brother-in-law Lucius’s son grew up to finish dismantling the Republic, paving the way for the empire that followed. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar.