The winter festival of the crossroads, the Compitalia, had always been an excuse for riotous celebrations. To the poor, crammed into the maze of back alleys that snarled off every shopping street in Rome, the opportunity to band together, to honour the gods who protected their neighbourhood, was a precious one. But to the rich, it spelled trouble. The Senate, impatient with anything that appeared to challenge its authority, had spent the sixties BC legislating the Compitalia virtually out of existence. The local trade associations, the collegia, which had traditionally organised street parties during the festival, had been the particular focus of senatorial suspicion. In 64 they had been banned altogether. The festival itself had been left to wither and die.
By 59, the Compitalia had become so drained of menace that Cicero could regard it as nothing more than a pleasant backdrop to a stroll. His old friend Atticus was over from Greece, and in January, to celebrate the festival, Cicero suggested that they tour the city’s crossroads together. The two men had much to discuss. It was the first month of Caesar’s consulship. A few weeks previously Cicero had been approached by an agent of the triumvirate. Would he be interested, the agent had asked, in joining forces with Caesar, Pompey and Crassus? Cicero had failed to appreciate this offer for what it was, a chance to rule Rome – but even had he done so, he would surely still have turned it down. He was the conqueror of Catiline, after all. How could he possibly take part in a conspiracy against the Republic? The rule of law was precious to him – even more precious than his personal safety. Cicero, who was not a fearless man by nature, knew that his decision had left him dangerously exposed. Just think, he told Atticus wistfully, what he had turned his back on: ‘reconciliation with my enemies, peace with the great unwashed, a leisured old age’.10
All the same, his nerves cannot have been too badly on edge, else he would never have suggested a tour of the crossroads. It had been in the cramped maze of Rome’s alleyways that Catiline had sought to foster revolution, and three years after his death the spectres of debt and hunger still stalked the festering streets. As Cicero and Atticus negotiated their way through the filth they could hardly have failed to notice the signs of want. The aristocracy was not entirely oblivious to the sufferings of the poor. Cicero himself, when it suited him, might make eloquent common cause with what he privately disparaged as the ‘mob’. Others went well beyond words. The senator responsible for doubling the distribution of subsidised grain in Rome had been none other than that pillar of the establishment Marcus Cato. Of course, even while promoting welfare, he had made sure to appear as stern and rectitudinous as ever. He did not, as Caesar did, seduce his fellow citizens, make them feel loved. Differences between politicians were a matter less of policy than of image. It would have been as insulting for Cato to be labelled a demagogue as for a matron to be confused with a whore.
This was why crossroads, which were notoriously the haunt of both rabble-rousers and prostitutes, were rarely frequented by the respectable; they were good for the occasional day out, perhaps, but nothing more than that. An association with crossroads could be grievously damaging to a citizen’s good name – or to his wife’s. Clodia Metelli, for instance, had found herself stuck with the mortifying nickname of ‘Lady Copper-Bit’,11 after the low-rent hookers who plied their trade on street corners. One spurned lover described her as selling herself ‘on crossroads and back-alleys’,12 while another sent her a purse filled with copper coins. Clodia was susceptible to these slanders because of her reputation for promiscuity and her raffish sense of fashion, but slang was not the limit of her taste for gangster chic. Disrespect was invariably punished. Humiliations were answered in kind. The humorist responsible for the gift of coppers had soon had the smile wiped off his face. Publicly beaten and gang-raped, it was he who had been used like a whore.
On no one did Clodia’s glamorous blend of style and violence have a more profound influence than her younger brother. What would have been fatal to the career of a conventional politician was grasped by Clodius as a potential lifeline. He badly needed one. Acquitted of impiety he might have been, but his prospects had been severely damaged by the exposés of his trial. For a member of the Republic’s most arrogant family, the discovery of how little support he commanded from his own class had been a wounding humiliation. As Lucullus could vouch, Clodius was as sensitive to personal affronts as he was imaginative in finding ways to avenge them. Cold-shouldered by the Senate, he began to play up to the slums. The poor, like every other class of Roman, were easily dazzled by snob appeal, and Clodius had both star quality and the popular touch to excess: a man capable of provoking a mutiny in defence of his wounded honour was clearly a demagogue of genius. Even so, Clodius would need to be elected tribune before he could hope to marshal the mob – and therein lay a problem. How could a man who was patrician to his fingertips hold an office reserved exclusively for plebeians? Only by becoming a plebeian himself – a move so unorthodox that it would require a public vote to secure his adoption into a plebeian family, which in turn would need to be sanctioned by a consul. This, in 59, effectively meant Caesar, a man well aware of Clodius’ talent for making trouble. The time might come when the triumvirate would find a use for his antics; but in the meanwhile Caesar was content to leave the would-be tribune to stew.
All of which Atticus, a fixture at Clodia’s dinner parties and therefore privy to Claudian gossip, was well placed to pass on to his friend. Cicero duly breathed a deep sigh of relief. Yet even with Clodius muzzled he found that the past kept on slipping its leash. One particular embarrassment was his former colleague as consul, Antonius Hybrida. After a corrupt and inept spell as governor of Macedon, the Catilinarian turncoat had just resurfaced in Rome. Also back in town, eager to make a mark, and to obscure his own involvement with Catiline, was the precocious Marcus Caelius. On both counts Hybrida presented him with an irresistible target. In April 59 Caelius brought a prosecution. He savaged the defendant in a brilliantly witty speech, portraying him as a disgrace to the Republic, whose twin policies as governor had been to grope slave-girls and spend his whole time drunk. But Cicero, for the defence, failed to enjoy his protégé’s jokes. He had no fondness for Hybrida, but knew that the conviction of his former colleague, the man whose army had brought about Catiline’s final demise, would have ominous implications for himself. His rushed execution of the conspirators had not been forgotten, nor, by many, forgiven. When Hybrida was duly convicted the slums erupted in cheering. Bunches of flowers appeared on Catiline’s grave.
For Cicero, the disaster of Hybrida’s conviction was compounded by a fatal miscalculation. During the trial, in the course of a bad-tempered speech, he had dared to attack the members of the triumvirate by name. Caesar, aggravated by this buzzing of dissent, promptly moved to silence it. The means was ready to hand. Within hours of the speech having been given, Clodius had been declared a plebeian. Cicero, panicking, bolted from Rome. Hunkered down in a villa on the coast, he bombarded Atticus with frantic letters, begging him to milk Clodia for news of her brother’s intentions. Then, towards the end of the month, venturing out on to the Appian Way, he ran into a friend coming from Rome who confirmed for him that, yes, Clodius was indeed standing for election to the tribunate. But if that were the bad news, then there was also some good. Clodius, it appeared, mercurial as ever, had already turned on Caesar. This immediately set Cicero to building castles in the air. Perhaps his two enemies, consul and prospective tribune, might end up destroying each other? A week later and Cicero was cheerleading for Clodius. ‘Publius is our only hope,’ he confided to Atticus. ‘So yes, let him become a tribune, please, yes!’13
Even by Cicero’s standards this was a startling turnaround. Yet in a city seething with machinations no feud could ever be reckoned eternal. Nothing better illustrated this than the identity of the friend who had met Cicero on the Appian Way. Curio, Clodius’ closest political ally, was every bit as unprincipled and volatile as his friend. Since orchestrating the intimidation of Cicero at Clodius’ trial he had continued to blot his reputation with scandal. His relationship with Hybrida’s nephew, a rugged, handsome young man by the name of Mark Antony, had become the talk of Rome. Even by the standards of the time the scale of their debts was regarded as shocking. It was whispered that Antony, despite his bull-neck and muscle-bound body, dressed as a woman to play the role of Curio’s wife. When the two men had been banned from seeing each other Curio had smuggled his friend in through his father’s roof – or so the scandal-rakers claimed.* Then, in the year of Caesar’s consulship, gossip and disapproval had abruptly turned to praise. Curio, far too arrogant to cringe before anyone, raised the morale of the entire Senate by his flamboyant defiance of Caesar. There was no more talk of him now as ‘Curio’s little daughter’. Instead, his recklessness was hailed as the courage of a patriot. Respectable senators saluted him in the Forum. The circus greeted him with rapturous acclaim.
These were marks of honour that any citizen might desire. In the shadow cast by the triumvirate Curio’s defiance illumined the Republic. It was certainly no idle fantasy for Cicero to hope that Clodius might be tempted to share in his friend’s glory. Yet fantasy it was soon to prove. Clodius had recognised, far more cynically and penetratingly than anyone else, the full scale of the opportunities presented by the crisis. For the moment at least the mould of the Republic had been shattered. Clodius, who rarely came across an orthodoxy without flaunting his contempt for it, was perfectly suited to this new climate of lawlessness. Rather than take a stand against the triumvirate, he prepared not merely to emulate their methods but to push them to new extremes. After all, with a conventional political career closed off to him, he had nothing to lose. Clodius was not interested in the bleating praise of men like Cicero. What he wanted, like any member of his arrogant, high-reaching family, was power. Win that and the marks of honour would surely follow soon enough.
His plan was simple: seduce the mob and seize control of the streets. So criminal, so outrageous was this policy that in more settled times surely not even Clodius would have dared conceive it. With the events of Caesar’s consulship, however, the fatal toxin of violence had been reintroduced to the Republic, and its poison was spreading fast. The triumvirate wished to maintain its stranglehold; the conservatives in the Senate wished to break free; both sides needed an ally prepared to dirty his hands. Clodius, promoting himself as just such a man, began alternately to woo and menace the two sides. ‘Selling himself now to this client,’ Cicero sneered, ‘now to that’14 – a whore, just like his sister. But Clodius’ capriciousness disguised a savage sense of focus. In his ambitions, if not his loyalties, he was utterly constant. He wished to prove himself worthy of his family name. And in addition, of course, he wished to see Cicero destroyed.
In December Clodius took up his tribunate. He had prepared for the moment with great care. A raft of legislation was immediately laid before the people. The bills were crowd-pleasers all. Most blatantly eye-catching was a proposal to replace the subsidised grain supplies established by Cato with a free monthly dole. The slums duly seethed with gratitude, but Clodius had no illusions that this counted for much in itself. Of all the many treacherous foundations upon which a nobleman might build a career, none was more shifting than the affections of the poor: just as discipline made an army, so the lack of it made a mob. But what if a way could be found to mobilise the slums? This was the question that Clodius, surreptitiously, had introduced in the form of an innocuous-sounding second bill. He proposed that the Compitalia be restored to its full glory; the collegia too. All across the vast sprawl of Rome, wherever there were crossroads, the banned clubs would be reformed. Clodius, with his gangster swagger, had always cut a dash as their patron. Now, if the law could only be passed, they would be bound to him for ever. Wherever there was a crossroads he would have a private gang.
This was a potentially massive innovation. Indeed, so massive an innovation was it that the Senate entirely failed to recognise it as such. The idea that a nobleman and the poor might have intimate bonds of obligation was entirely alien to the Roman mind, nor could anyone even conceive what the consequences might be. As a result, Clodius found it easy to force through the measure. He dealt with what limited opposition there was contemptuously, by twisting arms and greasing palms. Even Cicero was bought off. Using Atticus as a go-between, Clodius promised not to prosecute him over the executions of the conspirators, and Cicero, after much havering, agreed in return not to attack his enemy’s bills. In early January 58 the legislation was passed. On the same day Clodius and his heavies occupied the temple of Castor, a convenient stone’s throw away from the centre of the Forum. Here was where the collegia were to be organised. The space around the temple began to fill with tradesmen and artisans from the crossroads, chanting Clodius’ name and jeering at his opponents. The steps to the temple itself were demolished, leaving the podium as a fortress. The collegia were restructured on paramilitary lines. The threat of violence grew ever more palpable in the air. Then, suddenly, the storm broke. When one of Caesar’s lieutenants was arraigned for prosecution and appealed to the tribune for help, Clodius’ gangs piled in, mugging the judge where he sat and smashing up the court. The trial itself was permanently abandoned. As an exercise in controlled thuggery, its success appears to have exceeded the expectations of even Clodius himself.
It certainly prostrated Cicero. Not only had his deadliest enemy revealed an alarming talent for organised violence, but he had also publicly aligned himself with the interests of Caesar. Since the end of his consulship, the new governor of Gaul had been lurking beyond the city’s boundary, keeping track of events in Rome. Now he watched on in studied silence as Clodius prepared for his revenge. Trampling on the spirit, if not the letter, of his agreement with Cicero, the tribune brought forward yet another bill. Dressed up as a statement of stern republican principle, it proposed that any citizen guilty of putting another to death without trial should be sent into exile. There was no need to mention names. Everyone knew its target. With this deft push, Cicero was sent slithering and slipping towards the brink.
Scrabbling desperately to haul himself back, he grew his hair, put on mourning and toured the streets. Clodius’ gangs dogged him, hurling abuse, stones and shit. Hortensius, trying to rally to his old rival’s support, was cornered and almost lynched. Wherever Cicero looked, he found the escape routes blocked. The consuls, respectable senators who would normally have stood up for him, had been bribed with lucrative provincial commands. The Senate was cowed. Caesar, when Cicero brought himself to grovel in the proconsul’s tent, was apologetic, but shrugged his shoulders and said that there was nothing he could do. Perhaps, he suggested silkily, Cicero might care to reconsider his opposition to the triumvirate and take a post on the governor’s staff in Gaul? No matter how desperate Cicero’s plight, that would have been a humiliation too far. Even exile was preferable to abject dishonour. Briefly, Cicero thought of fighting back, of organising street gangs of his own, but he was dissuaded by his friends. It was Hortensius, still covered in scars and bruises, who advised him to cut his losses and go. Stunned by the scale and suddenness of the catastrophe, taunted by the jeering from the pickets outside his house, contemplating the ruin of a lifetime’s achievement, Cicero numbly prepared for his departure. Only in the dead of night did he at last dare steal out from his house. Travelling on foot to avoid attention from Clodius’ gangs, he slunk through the streets towards the city gates. By dawn he was safely on the Appian Way. Behind him, as the morning hearth fires began to be lit, Rome shimmered and then vanished beneath a haze of brown smoke.
As the news began to spread through the waking city, Clodius was as stunned as everyone else. In an ecstasy of triumphalism his mobs surged up the Palatine and occupied Cicero’s house. The wretched exile’s mansion, his pride and joy, the most visible and public mark of his rank, was trashed. Then the demolition men moved in. Watched by a packed Forum, the house was torn to pieces, block by block, while next to it, casting the rubble in its imposing shadow, Clodius’ mansion stood proud and inviolate. Just in case this act of vengeance was mistaken for mob violence, rather than the justified punishment of an enemy of the people, the tribune rushed through yet another bill, formally condemning Cicero by name. On the building site where the criminal’s mansion had once stood, a temple to Liberty was raised. The remaining land was annexed by Clodius himself. All was transcribed on to a tablet of bronze, which the tribune, stern-faced, then carried to the Capitol and placed on public display. Here they were to stay for eternity, testifying to his glory, and to Cicero’s crimes.
No wonder that the struggle for pre-eminence in the Republic was growing so savage, when the rewards could be so sweet.