Prior to the cataclysms of 146 there had been some confusion among the Greeks as to the precise definition of ‘freedom’. When the Romans claimed to be guaranteeing it, what did this mean? One could never be sure with barbarians, of course: their grasp of semantics was so woefully inadequate. All the same, it did not require a philosopher to point out that words might be slippery and dangerously dependent on perspective. And so it had proved. Roman and Greek interpretations of the word had indeed diverged. To the Romans, who tended to regard the Greeks as fractious children in need of the firm hand of a pater familias, ‘freedom’ had meant an opportunity for the city states to follow rules laid down by Roman commissioners. To the Greeks, it had meant the chance to fight each other. It was this incompatibility of viewpoints that had led directly to the tragedy of Corinth’s destruction.
After 146 there could be no more quibbling over diplomatic language. The treaties of friendship that governed relations between the Republic and her allies now stood brutally defined. They granted the Republic freedom of action, and her allies none at all. If the Greek cities were still permitted a nominal autonomy, then this was only because Rome wanted the benefits of empire without the bother of administering it. Cowed and obsequious, states far beyond the shores of Greece also redoubled their efforts to second-guess the Republic’s will. Throughout the monarchies of the East, assorted royal poodles would jump whenever the Romans snapped their fingers, perfectly aware that even a hint of independence might result in the hamstringing of their war elephants, or the sudden promotion of rivals to their thrones. It was the last monarch of Pergamum, a Greek city controlling most of what is now western Turkey, who took the resulting spirit of collaboration to its logical extreme. In 133 he left his entire kingdom to the Republic in his will.
This was the most spectacular bequest in history. Fabled for the gargantuan splendour of her monuments and the wealth of her subject cities, Pergamum offered the prospect of riches beyond even the Romans’ plunder-sated dreams. But what was to be done with the legacy? Responsibility for that decision lay with the Senate, an assembly of some three hundred of Rome’s great and good, generally acknowledged – even by those not in it – to be both the conscience and the guiding intelligence of the Republic. Membership of this elite was determined not automatically by birth but by achievement and reputation – as long as he had not blotted his copy-book too outrageously, any citizen who had held high office could expect to be enrolled in it as a matter of course. This gave to the Senate’s deliberations immense moral weight, and even though its decrees never had the technical force of law, it was a brave – or foolhardy – magistrate who chose to ignore them. What was the Republic, after all, if not a partnership between Senate and people – ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’, as the formula put it? Stamped on the smallest coins, inscribed on the pediments of the vastest temples, the abbreviation of this phrase could be seen everywhere, splendid shorthand for the majesty of the Roman constitution – ‘SPQR’.
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.
Next, however, came a more fateful step. Mithridates had to decide whether to take the attack to Rome herself. Superpowers were not taken on lightly, but war with the Republic was a challenge for which Mithridates had been preparing all his reign. Like any ambitious despot, he had worked hard to beef up his offensive capabilities, and his army was shiny new – literally so, since its weapons were embossed with gold and its armour with bright jewels. But if Mithridates liked to make a splash, he also enjoyed playing at cloak and dagger: travelling undercover through Asia, he had seen enough to convince him of the provincials’ hatred of Rome. This, more than anything, was what persuaded him to take the plunge. Crossing into the province of Asia, he found the garrisons protecting it scanty and ill-prepared, and the Greek cities eager to hail him as a saviour. In a matter of weeks Roman power in the province had totally collapsed, and Mithridates found himself standing on the shore of the Aegean Sea.
As a matricidal barbarian he was hardly the kind of champion the Greeks would normally have taken to their hearts. But better a matricidal barbarian than the publicani – the longing for freedom was so desperate, and the loathing of Rome so visceral, that the provincials were willing to go to any lengths to dispose of their oppressors. In the summer of 88, when Rome’s chains had already been thrown off, they were to demonstrate this in a horrific explosion of violence. Aiming to bind the Greek cities to him irrevocably, Mithridates wrote to them, ordering the massacre of every Roman and Italian left in Asia. The Greeks followed his instructions with savage relish. The atrocity was all the more terrible for the secrecy with which it had been prepared and the perfect co-ordination of the attacks. Victims were rounded up and slaughtered by hired assassins, hacked to pieces as they clung to sacred statues, or shot as they attempted to escape into the sea. Their bodies were left to rot unburied outside city walls. Eighty thousand men, women and children were said to have been killed on that single, deadly night.10
As a blow to the Roman economy, this was calculated and devastating; but as a blow to Roman prestige it was far worse. Mithridates had already shown himself a master of propaganda, resurrecting the Sibyl’s prophecies and throwing in some new ones of his own in order to make them appear more relevant to himself. The common theme was the appearance of a great king from the East, an instrument of divine retribution sent to humble the arrogant and grasping superpower. The mass slaughter of businessmen was only one way in which Mithridates chose to dramatise this. Even more calculated for effect was the execution of Manius Aquillius, the Roman commissioner who had provoked Mithridates into war in the first place. Falling ill at just the wrong moment, the unfortunate Aquillius was captured and dragged back to Pergamum, shackled all the way to a seven-foot barbarian. After tying him to an ass and parading him through jeering crowds, Mithridates next ordered some treasure melted down. When all had been prepared, Aquillius’ head was jerked back, his mouth forced open, and the molten metal poured down his throat. ‘War-mongers against every nation, people and king under the sun, the Romans have only one abiding motive – greed, deep-seated, for empire and riches.’11 This had been the verdict of Mithridates on the Republic and now, in the person of her legate in Asia, he exacted symbolic justice. Manius Aquillius choked to death on gold.