The Gang of Three

In 60 BCE, two years after he had returned to Rome, Pompey was frustrated that the senate had not yet formally ratified his eastern settlement, instead procrastinating by confirming it piece by piece, not en bloc. And, as any general then had to do, he was looking for land on which to settle his ex-soldiers. Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had finally led Roman troops to victory against Spartacus and was reputedly the richest man in Rome, had recently taken up the case of a struggling company of state contractors. They had bid far too much for the tax rights of the province of Asia, and Crassus was trying to get them permission to renegotiate the price. Julius Caesar, the least experienced, and least wealthy, of the three, wanted to secure election to the consulship of 59 BCE and a major military command to follow, not merely the policing duties against brigands in Italy that the senate had in mind for him. Mutual support seemed the best way to achieve these various aims. So, in an entirely unofficial deal, they pooled resources, power, contacts and ambition to get what they wanted in the short term – and in the longer.

For many ancient observers this was another milestone on the road to the breakdown of Republican government. The poet Horace, looking back from the other side of that breakdown, was only one of those who singled out the year 60 BCE, when he referred, according to traditional Roman dating, to ‘the civil war that began when Metellus was consul’. ‘Cato the Younger’ – the great grandson of ‘the Elder’ (p. 204) and one of Caesar’s most uncompromising enemies – argued that the city was overturned not when Caesar and Pompey fell out but when they became friends. The idea that the political process had been fixed behind the scenes seemed in some ways worse than the open violence of the previous decades. Cicero captured the point nicely when he observed that in Pompey’s notebook there was a list not only of past consuls but of future ones too.

It was not such a complete takeover as those comments imply. There were all kinds of strains, disagreements and rivalries between the three men, and if Pompey really did have a notebook with a list of the gang’s choice of future consuls, the electoral process sometimes got the better of them and someone quite different, not at all to their liking, was voted in. Nonetheless, they did pull off their immediate goals. Caesar was duly elected consul for 59 BCE and, among a series of measures that strongly resembled the programmes of earlier, radical tribunes, sponsored legislation on behalf of the other two. He also secured a military command for himself in southern Gaul, to which a vast area on the other side of the Alps was soon added.

For much of the 50s BCE, the machinations of members of the gang continued to be a major force in Roman politics, even though Caesar made only periodic visits to Italy and Crassus never returned from the campaign he led in 55 BCE against the Parthian Empire, centred in what is now Iran, which in many ways replaced Mithradates in Roman fears. It is partly Crassus’ early death that makes his role and importance within the trio difficult to assess. But the tragedy of his defeat and gory decapitation, and the humiliation of the capture of his army’s ceremonial standards, resonated for years. The decisive Parthian victory came in 53 BCE at the Battle of Carrhae, on what is now the border between Turkey and Syria. Crassus’ head was sent as a trophy to the Parthian king’s residence, where it was instantly reused as a prop, standing in for the head of the tragic Pentheus, decapitated by his mother, in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae (interestingly part of the Parthian repertoire). The standards remained a proud piece of Parthian booty until the emperor Augustus, by some adept diplomacy dressed up as a military achievement, brought them back to Rome in 19 BCE.

45. A silver coin issued under Augustus celebrates the return by the Parthians of the Roman standards captured at the Battle of Carrhae. The Parthian who submissively offers back the standards is dressed in traditional Eastern trousers. The figure on the other side is, significantly, the goddess ‘Honour’. In reality, it was more a negotiated deal than a military victory by the Romans.

The controversies of this period in the mid first century BCE are documented in vivid microdetail, thanks largely to the letters of Cicero, sometimes written daily and full of unsubstantiated rumours, second-guessing, hints of plots, half-truths, gossip, unreliable speculation and foreboding. ‘The political situation alarms me more each day’ and ‘There is a whiff of dictatorship in the air’ are typical refrains, among more practical exchanges about loans and debts or triumphalist news of Caesar’s daring, if very temporary, landing on Britain. They offer extraordinary evidence for politics as it happened that is unique in the classical world, and probably in any world before the fifteenth century CE. Yet they also tend to exaggerate the impression of confusion and political breakdown, or at least present a picture that is hard to compare with earlier periods. How disordered and cut-throat might the world of Scipio Africanus and Fabius Cunctator appear had their private letters and jottings survived rather than just the retrospective accounts of Livy and others? What is more, the overwhelming quantity of material from Cicero’s pen can make it hard to see beyond his perspectives and prejudices.

The career of Publius Clodius Pulcher is a case in point. Clodius first crossed swords with Cicero in a scandal at the end of 62 BCE, after a man was discovered in what was supposed to be a solemn, all-female religious festival being led by Julius Caesar’s wife. Some suspected that this was a lovers’ tryst rather than a simple prank, and Caesar took the precaution of a speedy divorce, on the famous grounds that ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’. Many pointed the finger of blame at Clodius, who was put on trial, with Cicero appearing as a key witness for the prosecution. The upshot was an acquittal and lasting enmity between Clodius and Cicero – who predictably, but possibly wrongly, claimed that massive bribery had secured the verdict of not guilty.

Clodius’ subsequent reputation for outright villainy has been almost entirely formed by Cicero’s enmity. He has gone down in history as the mad patrician who not only arranged to be adopted into a plebeian family in order to stand for the tribunate but also put two fingers up to the whole process by choosing an adoptive father younger than himself. Once elected, in 58 BCE he engineered Cicero’s exile for the tough line he had taken against Catiline’s associates, introduced a series of laws that attacked the whole basis of Roman government, and terrorised the streets with his private militia. Rome was saved from this monster only when he was killed in 52 BCE after picking a fight with the slaves of one of Cicero’s friends, at the so-called Battle of Bovillae. No alternative views of Clodius have survived. But almost certainly the other side of the story would have made him a radical reformer in the tradition of the Gracchi (one of his laws made the distribution of grain in the city entirely free), lynched by a reactionary thug and his hangers-on. Not even Cicero’s efforts for the defence secured acquittal on the murder charge for his friend, who ended up a neighbour of Verres in exile in Marseilles.

The politics of the 50s BCE are a curious mixture of business as usual, perilous breakdown and ingenious, or desperate, attempts to adapt traditional political rules to meet new crises as they appeared. It is hard to know what to make of Cicero in the late 50s BCE, in the safety of his study, writing about the theory of Roman politics in ways that would have been familiar to Polybius while only a few hundred metres from his house on the Palatine there were increasingly frequent riots in the Forum and outbreaks of violence and arson, including the torching of the senate house for Clodius’ funeral pyre. Perhaps this was his attempt to restore order, at least in his head. Others took more practical measures and devised some brave innovations. In 52 BCE, for example, after the murder of Clodius, Pompey was elected sole consul. Rather than resort to appointing a dictator to take charge of the growing crisis, with all the memories of Sulla’s dictatorship, the senate decided to give to one man an office which by definition had always been shared between two. This time the gamble paid off. Within a few months Pompey had not only taken firm control of the city but also taken a colleague, albeit keeping it in the family: it was his new father-in-law.

More problematic were the tactics adopted by, or forced upon, Julius Caesar’s fellow consul in 59 BCE, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, a staunch opponent of much of the legislation Caesar was introducing. Menaced by Caesar’s supporters, showered with that all too familiar vehicle of Roman disaffection – excrement – and more or less confined to his house, he was unable to voice his opposition in any of the regular ways. So he stayed at home and sent out messages announcing that he was ‘watching the heavens’ for signs and omens. There was definite religious and political force behind this. The support of the gods underpinned Roman politics, and it was an essential axiom that no political decision could be taken until it was clear that there were no adverse omens. Yet ‘watching the heavens’ was never intended as a means of obstructing political action indefinitely, and those on Caesar’s side claimed that Bibulus was illegitimately manipulating religious rules. The issue was never resolved. It was typical of the uncertainties of the period, and of the difficulties the Romans faced in making old rules solve new dilemmas, that for years the status of all the public business conducted in 59 BCE remained unclear. In the late 50s BCE Cicero was still wondering about the legality of Clodius’ adoption and the settlement of Pompey’s veterans. Had the legislation all been properly passed or not? Very different views were possible.

The most pressing political issue of the period, however, came not directly from Rome but from Caesar in Gaul. He had left Italy in 58 BCE on a five-year command, and this was rolled on for another five years in 56 BCE – with the warm support, in public at least, of Cicero, who pointed to the danger of Gallic enemies much as he had earlier pointed to the danger of Mithradates. Caesar’s description of these campaigns in the seven volumes of his Commentaries on the Gallic War, an edited version of his official annual dispatches from the front line sent back to Rome, starts with its famous, clinical opener, ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’ (‘The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts’). It ranks alongside Xenophon’s description (the Anabasis, or Going Up) of his exploits with a Greek mercenary army, written in the fourth century BCE, as the only detailed eyewitness account of any ancient warfare to survive. It is not exactly a neutral document. Caesar had a shrewd eye for his public image, and the Commentaries is a carefully contrived justification of his conduct and parade of his military skills. But it is also an early example of what we might call imperial ethnography. Unlike Cicero, whose letters from Cilicia betray no interest whatsoever in the local surroundings, Caesar was deeply engaged with the foreign customs he witnessed, from the drinking habits of the Gauls, including the barbaric prohibition of wine among some tribes, to the religious rituals of the Druids. His is a wonderfully Roman vision of people whom he clearly did not entirely understand, but it still forms the basic reference point for modern discussions of the culture of pre-Roman northern Europe – an irony, given that it was a culture he was in the process of changing for ever.

Reading between the lines of the Commentaries, anyone will see that both genuine Roman anxieties about enemies in the north and Caesar’s desire to outstrip in military glory any of his rivals drove the decade of warfare in Gaul. Caesar ended up bringing more territory under Roman control than Pompey had in the East and crossing over what Romans called ‘the Ocean’, the waterway that separated the known world from the great unknown, to set foot briefly on the remote and exotic island of Britain. It was a symbolic victory that resonated loudly back home, even earning a passing reference in a poem by Catullus, when he wrote about ‘going to visit the memorials of “Caesar the Great”: the Rhine in Gaul, the terrible sea and the faraway Britons’.

In doing this, Caesar laid the foundations for the political geography of modern Europe, as well as slaughtering up to a million people over the whole region. It would be wrong to imagine that the Gauls were peace-loving innocents brutally trampled by Caesar’s forces. One Greek visitor in the early first century BCE had been shocked to find enemy heads casually pinned up at the entrance to Gallic houses, though he conceded that, after a while, one got used to the sight; and Gallic mercenaries had done good business in Italy until the power of Rome had closed their market. Yet the mass killing of those who stood in Caesar’s way was more than even some Romans could take. Cato, driven partly no doubt by his enmity of Caesar and speaking from partisan as well as humanitarian motives, suggested that he should be handed over for trial to those tribes whose women and children he had put to death. Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

The pressing question was what would happen when Caesar left Gaul and how after almost ten years there from 58 BCE, with the power and wealth he had accumulated, he was to be reintegrated into the ordinary mainstream of politics. As often, Romans debated this in highly legal terms. There were fierce and technical controversies about the precise date on which his military command was supposed to come to an end and whether he would then be allowed to move directly, without a break, into another consulship. For any period as a private citizen, out of office, would provide a window for a prosecution, among other things over the questionable legality of his acts in 59 BCE. On the one hand were those who, for whatever reasons, personal or principled, wanted to bring Caesar back down to size; on the other, Caesar and his supporters insisted that this treatment was humiliating, that his dignitas – a distinctively Roman combination of clout, prestige and right to respect – was being attacked. The underlying issue was brutally straightforward. Would Caesar, with more than 40,000 troops at his disposal only a few days from Italy, follow the example of Sulla or of Pompey?

Pompey himself cautiously remained on the sidelines almost up to the final breakdown and in the middle of 50 BCE was still trying to find Caesar a reasonably honourable exit strategy. In December of that year the senate voted by a majority of 370 to 22 that Caesar and Pompey should simultaneously give up their commands. Pompey was actually in Rome at the time, but since 55 BCE, thanks to another piece of ingenuity, he had been the governor of Spain, doing the job remotely, through deputies – an unprecedented arrangement that became a standard feature of the rule of the emperors. It is the clearest sign of the impotence of the senate at this point that, in response to this overwhelming vote, Pompey took no notice and Caesar, after a few more rounds of fruitless negotiation, marched into Italy.