PART ONE
Rome, Capital of the World: a fifteenth-century woodcut proclaims the pre-eminence of the Eternal City. Romulus and Remus, its mythical founders, appear on the left of the picture.
ONE
In the days of Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors, a young writer from Padua, Titus Livius, brought to a close the first part of his epic history of the city in which he had come to live. His story had begun in that remote age, seven hundred years before his own birth, in which the origins of Rome were overcast by the mists of romantic legend. Its scene was the high ground overlooking the Tiber some fifteen miles from the salt flats through which the river flowed to the sea. Down the slopes of the hills ran streams which formed swamps and small lakes in the valleys below.1 And beyond the valleys was the wide expanse of the Roman Campagna, a silent, undulating plain of woodland and pasture that stretched as far as the eye could reach to the surrounding mountains, to the Alban hills in the south, to the Apennines in the east, and, in the north, to the commanding heights of the empire of the Etruscans. Above a bend in the Tiber, where an island lay in midstream like an anchored ship, was the only place for miles at which the river could be crossed with ease. Here rose a hill which was to become known as the Palatine; and it was here, in the eighth century before Christ, that Titus Livius set his story.
He wrote of Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Rhea Silvia, daughter of Numitor, King of Alba Longa in the Alban Hills and a descendant of Aeneas, the hero of Troy. While a virgin attendant in a sacred shrine, Rhea Silvia had been raped by a man she claimed was Mars, god of war. Her twin babies had been left to die in a bucket by the waters of the flooded Tiber but had been saved by a she-wolf which had offered them her teats to suck and had nursed them gently until they were found by a herdsman who took them back to his hut. On reaching manhood, in 753 B.C. the twins decided to establish a new settlement for their tribe on the hills above the river where their lives had been saved; and they asked the gods of the countryside to declare by augury which of them should be its governor. Romulus then climbed to the top of the Palatine, while Remus took up his position on the summit of the nearby hill, the Aventine, to watch for signs in the flight of birds by which the gods made their wishes known. Soon six vultures flew across the Aventine, and Remus understood from this that his claims had been preferred. But then a flight of twelve vultures spread their wings above the Palatine, and Romulus took this as a sign that the gods' favours had fallen upon him. The brothers fell to quarrelling; their supporters began to fight each other; Remus jumped over the half-finished walls which his brother had built on the Palatine, and Romulus killed him in a fit of rage.
Thereafter Romulus's settlement grew and prospered. Yet, whereas there were strong and able men enough, there were too few women, the refugees from other tribes to whom asylum had been given at Rome, in the hope of increasing the population, being mostly male. Romulus, therefore, sent envoys to the surrounding peoples proposing intermarriage. But their offers were insultingly declined. To Romulus the use of force now seemed inevitable, and he set the scene of it with care and cunning. Concealing his resentment, he announced that the forthcoming celebrations of the Consualia, the festival Livy supposed was in honour of the water-deity Neptunus, would be held at Rome that year with particular splendour and that all surrounding tribes would be welcome to attend them. Among the peoples who accepted the invitation and came to inspect the walls and dwellings of the rapidly growing settlement were the Sabines, a well-favoured mountain tribe from the north. When the celebrations were at their height, the men of Rome fell upon the youngest of the Sabine women and dragged them to their homes, while their parents fled through the gates in panic-stricken terror. The fears of the Sabine girls were allayed by Romulus who assured them that as wives of Romans they would thereafter be treated well, sharing in the privileges of the new community and enjoying its coming greatness; they must overcome their present bitterness and give their hearts to those who had taken possession of their bodies.
In due time the Sabine women did learn to live contentedly with their Roman husbands, but the people from whom they had been seized could not forget the humiliation of their rape and planned to avenge it. Their opportunity arose when the daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, commander of the Roman garrison, who had gone outside her father's fortifications to fetch fresh water for a sacrifice, encountered in the valley a party of Sabine soldiers. She fell into flirtatious conversation with them and was persuaded to admit them into the citadel, asking to be given, as a reward for her treachery, ‘what they had on their shield arms’, meaning the gold bracelets the Sabines then wore from wrist to elbow. The bargain was struck and, on her part, fulfilled, but, once the Sabines had gained access to the citadel, they rewarded her not with the bracelets on their shield arms but with the shields themselves, crushing her to death beneath their weight as a fitting punishment for a traitor. In the ensuing battle with the Romans, the Sabines gained the first advantage; but then Romulus rallied his warriors and seemed on the point of destroying his opponents when the Sabine women, their hair hanging loose and their garments rent, pushed their way in a body between the combatants, begging them, as husbands on the one side and as fathers and brothers on the other, not to shed kindred blood. ‘The effect of the appeal was immediate and profound,’ so Livy recorded. ‘Silence fell. Not a man moved. A moment later Romulus and the Sabine commander stepped forward to make peace. Indeed, they went further: the two peoples were united under a single government, with Rome as the seat of power.’
As the years passed other rival tribes were engaged in battle and were defeated, and these vanquished tribes were allowed to establish their families in the neighbourhood of the victors, thus increasing the heterogeneous population of the settlement. Gradually, the power of Rome spread far and wide, westwards to the sea, eastwards to the Apennines, south towards the lands of the Volsci and north towards the empire of the Etruscans.
Romulus, the inspiration of Rome's victories, disappeared from sight one day when a cloud enveloped him as he was reviewing his soldiers in a thunderstorm on the ground beyond Rome's walls known as the Campus Martius.2 As the cloud lifted and the sun came out again it was seen that the royal throne was empty. There were those who said that the king had been lifted by a whirlwind back to the domain of the gods whence he had come. Others maintained that he had been murdered and his body had been concealed by some of the hundred senators he had created and who were now jealous of his power. But, after a year's interregnum during which the senators shared the government between them, another king was elected; and he in turn was followed by five others. The first of these six kings, all chosen after the necessary omens had been observed, was a learned Sabine and man of peace, Numa Pompilius. He it was who inspired the Romans with their fear of the gods. He appointed priests with specified religious duties and a high priest with wide authority over them, the Pontifex Maximus; he designated virgin acolytes to serve in the shrine of Vesta, goddess of the hearth and fireside, and to attend to her sacred flame; he introduced twelve Salii or Leaping Priests for the service of Mars, giving them a uniform of an embroidered tunic and bronze breastplate and providing them with sacred shields which they were to carry through the city as they chanted their hymns to the triple beat of their ritual dance. He divided the year into twelve lunar months and stipulated certain days upon which it would be unlawful to carry on public business; he built the Temple of Janus, god of gates and doors, which was to be left open when Rome was at war and closed in time of peace.3 And he succeeded in bringing peace to the city by securing treaties of alliance with those neighbouring peoples who were not already bound to it.
Upon Numa's death, however, this peace was disrupted by his royal successor, Tullus Hostilius, who won great glory as a soldier in a reign of thirty-two years. The next king, Ancus Marcius, was a grandson of Numa Pompilius whose noble record in the matter of religious observances he was determined to emulate. Yet Ancus was as ready as Tullus had been to fight for the honour and independence of Rome, provided that wars were declared and peace negotiations conducted in accordance with those strict legal formalities and unvarying rites which were later to be supervised by the priestly representatives of the Roman people, the fetials.
During Ancus's reign a clever, ambitious and cunning young man from Etruria came south to settle in Rome. The grandson of an exile from Corinth, he adopted the name of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus and within a few years had gained for himself so eminent a reputation in the city that he was able to secure his election to the throne on Ancus's death. As king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus planned the Circus Maximus,4 bringing down horses and boxers from Etruria to entertain the Romans in splendid public games; he enclosed the city within a new, strong wall; he drained the low-lying land where the city's Forum5 stood, making grants of land around this traditional meeting-place to builders of houses, shops and porticoes; and he laid the foundations for a new temple dedicated to Jupiter on the hill known as the Capitol.6
Sometime in about 579 B.C. this first Etruscan king of Rome was murdered by assassins hired by Ancus's who hoped to attain the succession for themselves. But, by concealing her husband's murder, the widowed queen was able to persuade the populace to accept her son-in-law, Servius Tullius, as regent, and eventually as king, entitled to wear the white and purple robe of royalty and to be preceded by lictors, members of the now traditional royal escort each of whom bore before him an axe bound with rods, symbolic of the king's power to beat and behead recalcitrant citizens without trial.
Once established in power, Servius Tullius began the great work for which he was always to be remembered, the organization of Roman society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. From now on, a census of the population was to be taken regularly, and the people, already divided into curiae for voting purposes, were to be further divided into various classes and assigned, according to their means, responsibilities in war and privileges in peace. The richest citizens were required to constitute the cavalry, theequites, or, as leaders of the infantry, to equip themselves with sword and spear as well as armour. The rest of the infantry was furnished by four other classes of citizens, the poorer of whom had merely to arm themselves with slings and stones. The poorest citizens of all were exempt from military service, but denied the political privileges which the other classes enjoyed in proportion to their rank.
Having thus organized Roman society in a class system based upon wealth, Servius Tullius then divided Rome into separate administrative areas. He also extended the boundaries of the city, taking in two other hills, the Quirinal and the Viminal, building a rampart around them and, beyond this rampart, distributing land which had been captured in war among ordinary citizens. This distribution much displeased the Senators and, in their discontent, Servius's rival, Tarquin, son of the murdered Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, saw his opportunity to replace him. Encouraged by his wicked and ambitious wife Tullia, Tarquin increased his influence in the Senate by promises and bribery and, when he considered the time ripe, he had Servius murdered. Tullia triumphantly drove over the corpse in her carriage, spattering her dress with blood. And so, in about 534 B.C., the tyranny of Tarquin the Proud began.
Declaring that an idle people was a burden on the state, he inaugurated a massive programme of public works, lavishing the spoils of a successful campaign against the Volscians upon the enlargement and adornment of the magnificent Temple of Jupiter which his father had begun, and setting to work upon it not only builders and craftsmen from all over Etruria but also hundreds of labourers from the proletariat of Rome. Work also began on improvements to the Circus where new tiers of seats were constructed, and upon the excavation of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer of the city.7
About this time, so Livy wrote, an alarming and ominous event occurred. A huge snake slid out of a narrow crack in a wooden pillar in the royal palace in the Forum. To interpret such omens it was customary to seek the advice of Etruscan soothsayers; but Tarquin felt that, since the portent had been observed in his own royal palace, he was justified in seeking enlightenment from Greece where, at Delphi, the most famous oracle in the world could be consulted. Unwilling to trust so important a mission to anyone else, he dispatched two of his three sons, Titus and Arruns, together with his nephew, Brutus.
At Delphi, having asked the oracle about the snake, the young princes could not resist making another inquiry: ‘Who is to be the next king of Rome?’ From the depths of the cavern came the answer: ‘He who shall be the first to kiss his mother shall hold in Rome supreme authority.’ Agreeing to keep this secret from their youngest brother, Sextus Tarquinius, who had been left behind in Rome, Titus and Arruns then drew lots to decide which of them, on return, should kiss their mother first. But, as they did so, their cousin, Brutus, far more astute and ambitious than he liked to appear, pretended to stumble and, falling to the ground, his lips touched the earth, mother of all living things.
Back in Italy the two princes and their brother were drinking together with friends when the conversation turned to the relative merits and faithfulness of their wives. One of the party, Collatinus, strongly maintained that his wife, Lucretia, was without doubt incomparably superior to all other women in Rome, and he undertook to prove it. If they called upon her unexpectedly now, he said, they would be sure to find her, unlike his companions' wives, engaged in some innocent and useful pursuit. And so it proved to be. While the other wives were enjoying themselves in the greatest luxury at a dinner party, Lucretia, surrounded by her maidservants, was hard at work spinning by lamplight. She rose to greet her husband and his friends, the princes; Collatinus, delighted with his success, invited them all to have supper with him.
During the meal the youngest of the princes, Sextus Tarquinius, was much taken with the beauty and proven chastity of his charming hostess; and, as lust rose within him, he determined to debauch her. Some days later he returned to the house when Lucretia was alone and, finding his way to her bedroom, he awakened her by placing his hand on her breast and whispering in her ear, ‘Lucretia, not a sound! It is Sextus Tarquinius. I am armed. If you utter a sound, I will kill you.’ But Lucretia refused to submit to his threats and blandishments until he said that he would dishonour her for ever in the eyes of the world by killing her first, then cutting the throat of a slave whose naked body he would place by her side. ‘Will they not believe,’ he asked her, ‘that you have been caught in adultery and paid the price?’ So Lucretia yielded; Sextus enjoyed her, and rode away, proud of his success.
The next day she told her father and husband, in the company of her husband's friend, Brutus, what had happened. Then she drew a knife from her robe and stabbed herself through the heart. Drawing the knife from her body, Brutus held it before him as he declared, ‘By this girl's blood and by the gods I swear that with sword and fire, and whatever else can lend strength to my arm, I will pursue Tarquin the Proud, his wicked wife and all his children, and never again will I let them or any other man be king in Rome!’
At Brutus's passionate bidding the populace of Rome rose up in arms against the tyrant. Tarquin and his two elder sons fled into exile in Etruria; his youngest son, Sextus, was killed. The Kingdom of Rome was at an end. And, in about 507 B.C., with Brutus and Collatinus appointed the first two Consuls in Rome, the days of the Republic began.
Such, then, were the legends of the early history of Rome, legends that clearly indicate the kinds of people and behaviour which later Romans found admirable; and if they were great enough to invent such legends, we at least, as Goethe said, should be great enough to believe them. In fact, behind the fanciful embellishment of the myths, many of them Greek in origin, there lies a basis of truth. There were, indeed, Iron Age settlements on several of the hills above the Tiber where Rome was to be built; and a hut of one of them, known as the House of Romulus, was still preserved as a showplace on the slopes of the Palatine in the days of the Empire. There are, in fact, grounds for believing that the people who lived in these settlements merged with the Sabines and that they were governed by a king and had the kind of class structure and military organization which Servius Tullius is said, on fairly strong evidence, to have imposed upon them. There is also evidence of Etruscan influence in Roman pottery and in the system of land drainage in the Roman Forum from about the time which the legends ascribe to the arrival in Rome of the exile from Etruria who was to become King Tarquinius Priscus.
These Etruscans were a mysterious people who seem to have arrived in Italy either by sea from the Balkans or overland from the north and to have established themselves in the Po Valley and along the western coast in what was to become Tuscany. They were experts in metal-work and in pottery as well as energetic merchants who carried on a thriving trade with the Greek cities of southern Italy. It was natural, therefore, that the Etruscans should be drawn towards Rome whose hills dominated the nearest place to the sea at which the river Tiber could be crossed, and towards the salt beds at the mouth of the Tiber whence the Via Salaria, the Salt Road, led towards Perugia and the other Etruscan towns in the north.
Once the Etruscans were established in Rome, their influence became pervasive and lasting. The kings adopted Etruscan clothes and regalia as well as the ceremonial chair, the sella curulis, later to become the symbol of authority of the Roman magistrate; the priests adopted Etruscan religious practices, their methods of divination and augury; the farmers learned Etruscan methods of tilling and draining land. Etruscan sacrifices of men and animals to propitiate the unquiet spirits of the dead were for long to be enacted in the Roman amphitheatre, while the Etruscan lictors’ axe and rods were to be revived as part of the trappings of Fascism.
The expulsion of the Etruscan kings and the warfare that soon broke out with rival states led to hard times for the Roman people. Trade was disrupted, agriculture depressed, plagues were persistent. In efforts to placate the gods, new temples were built in the city, temples to Apollo, a god of healing, to Ceres, goddess of corn, to Mercury, a god of trade, to Saturn, a god by whose favours crops were spared from blight. But the days continued dark and pestilential; and the poor grew ever more aware that under the Republic they had as little say in government and as few rights as they had had under the monarchy.
It seems that in 494 B.C. the discontent of the plebeians culminated in revolt against the patrician rule of magistrates and Senate. In the course of this revolt, when Rome was menaced by enemy armies, the plebeians marched out of the city on to the Aventine, threatening to found a separate community. Two Tribunes were consequently elected as representatives of the people, and later a Commission of Ten was established to compile a code of laws. The resultant Twelve Tables, the first landmark in the history of Roman law, were inscribed on bronze plaques and exhibited in the Forum; and for generations to come schoolboys were required to memorize and recite their provisions and to regard them as a cornerstone of the Republic whose greatness was symbolized in the device carried by the Republic's legions, S.P.Q.R. – Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. The Tables, while instituting some reforms, were a codification into law of the customs prevailing in what was still essentially a pastoral and highly conservative community. Many of their provisions were harsh but they did combine to go some way towards acquiring equality before the law for all the people of Rome. Punishments were savage: ‘Any person who destroys by burning any building or heap of corn deposited beside a house shall be bound, scourged and put to death by burning at the stake… If any person has sung or composed against another person a song which is slanderous or insulting he shall be clubbed to death… If theft has been done by night, if the owner kill the thief, the thief shall be held lawfully killed… Slaves caught in the act should be flogged and thrown from the [Tarpeian] Rock8… He who shall have roused up a public enemy, or handed over a citizen to a public enemy, must be executed.’ Yet ‘putting to death of any man who has not been convicted, whosoever he might be’ was forbidden; and there were many other clauses designed to protect the weak against the powerful.
For all their vaunted merits, however, the Twelve Tables did not bring the plebeians any closer to sharing authority with the Senate; nor did those theoretical powers they possessed, such as the sole right to declare war in their public Assembly, ever count for much. The Senate remained the effective government of Rome, and the men from those almost invariably rich families who constituted its membership also filled, as though by right, the principal offices of the Republic. The most venerable of these offices was that of the Consuls who wore red sandals with crescent-shaped buckles and leather thongs and a special toga with a wide purple band, and who, like the kings before them, were escorted by twelve lictors carrying the fasces, the rods and axe, as an emblem of state. Other, lesser offices, also occupied by patrician families, were the Quaestors, who, after 421 B.C., were
1. Statue of a Vestal Virgin, one of the priestesses who served Vesta, goddess of the hearth. The Vestal wore a sacral dress, otherwise used by brides only.
responsible for financial administration; the Censors, who were established in 440 B.C. to supervise the returns which determined the responsibility of citizens for taxes and military service; the Praetors, who presided in the courts of law; and the Aediles, who were responsible for the streets, temples, sewers and market-places of the city and who organized public displays, games and festivals. In times of crisis a Dictator could be appointed with supreme power and with the right to an escort of twenty-four lictors, though not with the right to ride a horse in Rome, a privilege that might have given him pretensions to regality.
As well as the political offices, there were the religious ones, and these, too, the patricians fought hard to keep out of the hands of the plebeians. They were all of great influence and none more so than the High Priest, the Pontifex Maximus, who, as master of the ‘sacred law’, presided over the College of Pontiffs. Responsible not only for adjustments in the calendar made necessary by a Roman year of 355 days and for all occasions in life or death, such as marriages, adoptions and burials, in which ritual was involved, the Pontifex Maximus also had charge of the virgins who served Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, whose circular temple, one of the earliest in Rome, was built in the centre of the Forum.9 These priestesses, free of all bodily defects and chosen between the ages of six and ten, were handed over in the House of the Vestal Virgins10 in the Forum by their fathers to the Pontifex Maximus who thereafter had full control over them. They were required to remain unmarried for thirty years and to devote that time to offering sacrifices, to performing the ordained rites, and to tending the sacred fire which symbolized the survival of the state. ‘And severe penalties have been established for their misdeeds,’ in the words of the Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus. ‘Vestals who are guilty of lesser misdemeanours are scourged with rods, but those who have suffered defilement by unchastity are delivered up to the most shameful and the most miserable death [by being buried alive]… There are many indications, it appears, when a priestess is not performing her holy functions with purity, but the principal one is the extinction of the fire which the Romans dread above all misfortunes, looking upon it, from whatever cause it proceeds, as an omen which portends the destruction of the city.’
In addition to his other duties, the Pontifex Maximus was responsible for ensuring that the gods were not mocked or displeased and that their wishes were made known. In divining these desires or commands he had the assistance of Augurs who were expert in interpreting the signs by which deities communicated their will to the earthly world in the voice of thunder or by flashes of lightning, by movements in the entrails of sacrificed animals, or by the flight of birds.
Ever since Romulus had seen in the flapping of vultures' wings a favourable omen for his foundation and governorship of the city, the Roman people had set great store by portents and their proper interpretation; and in times of danger, when unnatural events were often witnessed, they heard with alarm the spreading reports of monstrous births, of strange objects in the heavens, of statues pouring blood, of talking animals, of weeping corn, of stones and flesh falling from the heavens. Since the rules of divination were guarded by the Augurs in the strictest secrecy, and since portents could be interpreted in all manner of ways and, of course, invented, the powers of the priestly order of Augurs were immense. To prevent an election they had merely to declare that the time was not propitious to hold it; to block a law they had only to pronounce the omens had signified the gods' opposition to it. Cicero, who was later to confess that the office of Augur was the ‘one bait’ which could tempt him back into politics, went so far as to say that
the highest and most important authority in the state is that of the Augurs. For what power is greater than that of adjourning assemblies and meetings… or that of declaring null and void the acts of these assemblies?… What is of greater import than the abandonment of any business already begun after a single Augur has announced, ‘On another day’? What power is more impressive than that of forcing the Consuls to resign their offices? What right is more sacred than that of giving or refusing permission to hold an assembly of the people?
The Roman people's readiness to accept the verdict of the Augurs was rarely in doubt; their reverence for the gods was deep and unequivocal, and their offerings to them punctiliously observed, the scrupulous regard for the forms of the rite in Roman religion being held quite as important as the rite itself. The conservative statesman, Marcus Porcius Cato, a rigid upholder of ancestral customs and a large-scale farmer whose treatise on agriculture written in about 160 B.C. is the oldest extant complete prose work in Latin, advised his fellow-farmers:
Before you gather in the harvest you should offer a preliminary sacrifice of a sow pig in the following way. Offer the pig to Ceres before you store away these crops: spelt, wheat, barley, beans, rape seed. First address Janus, Jupiter and Juno with incense and wine before you sacrifice the pig. Offer a sacrificial cake to Janus with these words, ‘Father Janus, in offering to thee this sacrificial cake I make good prayers that thou be kind and favourable to me, my children and my house and household.’… [Also] make an offering to Mars Silvanus in the wood in the daytime for each head of work oxen. Three pounds of spelt grits, four and one half of lard, four and one half of meat, three sextarii of wine… No woman to be present at this sacrifice or to see how it is offered.
Precise instructions are then given of the words to be employed, of the other gods to be honoured with their due sacrifices, and of how they, too, should be addressed.
The Roman gods, indeed, were numerous and to each a proper and precise respect was due in accordance with their known powers. One god looked after the seed when it was underground, others when the grain was growing, yet others when it was stored. The god Nodutus cared for the stem, Volutina for the sheaths, Flora for the crop in flower, Matuta for it in its maturity, Runcina when it was gathered in.
Individual gods had their own specialist priests known as Flamens, but these were offices not so widely sought as those of the Augurs, for the Flamens were subject to numerous taboos. The Flamen of Jupiter, for example, was not permitted to ride a horse or see the army in battle array, to eat or even name certain foods, to pass under an arbour of vines or to go out into the open air without his cap. Additionally, according to the lawyer, Aulus Gellius, ‘the feet of the couch on which he sleeps must be smeared with a thin coating of clay, and he must not sleep away from his bed for three nights in succession, and no other person must sleep in that bed… If he has lost his wife he must abdicate his office. His marriage cannot be dissolved except by death.’
In the Capitoline temple of the god Jupiter, which this Flamen served, were kept the Sibylline Books, the Books of Fate, which contained the secret key to the destiny of Rome and which were, therefore, as awesomely regarded as the pronouncements of the Augurs. These Books of Fate, containing oracular utterances of the renowned Sibyl of Cumae, a Greek city in Campania, had been purchased and brought to Rome, so it was said, by Tarquinius Priscus. They were carefully guarded in the Temple of Jupiter where they were treated as sacred relics and consulted whenever important decisions were to be made. The texts they contained were framed in the vaguest terms and, as the sceptical Cicero complained, since all specific references to time and place were omitted, they could be interpreted as predicting anything that the Keeper of the Books wanted them to predict. His office, therefore, accorded him great political influence, and it was yet another one which the plebeians were determined to have opened to them.
From time to time the plebeians achieved a success in their struggle for political power. Not long after the promulgation of the Twelve Tables, for instance, in 445 B.C., the marriage of a plebeian with a patrician, forbidden by those laws, was allowed. In 348B.C.it was agreed that one of the two Consuls should always be a plebeian; and in 338 that the Senate should automatically ratify all measures voted by the People's Assembly. Then, in 287 B.C., when a Dictator, Quintus Hortensius, was in temporary office at a time of national crisis, it was decreed that resolutions of the plebeians' Council should have the force of law without the need for the Senate's concurrence. This appeared a major triumph for the plebeians; but in practice it did not prove so, for not only were the leading and richer members of the plebeians' Council those least interested in upsetting the established regime, but the Tribunes of the People, the Council's guiding lights, were soon persuaded to be less enthusiastic in their support of plebeian rights by the grant of senatorial privileges. So the plebeians failed to take advantage of their victory; the patricians, looking down upon them as their social inferiors, continued to control the Senate, and the Senate controlled the government.
Throughout the struggle between the classes, Rome was gradually extending its dominion. Rival peoples in central Italy were defeated, including the Etruscans whose capital Veii, only ten miles from Rome, was utterly destroyed. Some of the vanquished were granted full Roman citizenship, others lesser privileges; the unmanageable were kept in subjection until they too were considered worthy of joining the growing federation of states. There was, however, a serious setback at the end of the fourth century B.C., when Gaulish nomadic tribesmen from beyond the Alps swarmed down into Italy. ‘Terrified townships rushed to arms as the avengers went roaring by,’ so Livy recounted. ‘The air was loud with the dreadful din of the fierce war-songs and discordant shouts of a people whose very life is wild adventure… Men fled from the fields for their lives; and from all the immense host, covering miles of ground with its straggling masses of horse and foot, the cry went up “To Rome”.’
North of the city the Roman army was routed, and the Gallic squadrons poured through the city's open gates. All men capable of bearing arms, so Livy said, together with the women and children and the more able-bodied Senators, had withdrawn to the fortress on the Capitol, leaving the aged and useless in the city below. With these remained the oldest of the patricians who, dressed in the ceremonial robes they had been privileged to wear in their days of office, sat waiting for death in the courtyards of their houses upon the ivory-inlaid chairs of the city's magistrates. Here the enemy found them.
They might have been statues in some holy place, and for a while the Gallic warriors stood entranced; then, on an impulse, one of them touched the beard of a certain Marcus Papirius – it was long, as was the fashion of those days – and the Roman struck him on the head with his ivory staff. That was the beginning: the barbarians flamed into anger and killed him, and the others were butchered where they sat. From that moment no mercy was shown; houses were ransacked and the empty shells set on fire.
In Rome today evidence of this conflagration can still be seen in the layer of burnt debris, fragments of roof-tiles and carbonized wood at the edge of the Forum.
The Capitol, however, was held against the Gauls. An assault was made upon it in daylight and driven off. Then one starlit night another attempt was made. The enemy clambered silently up the steep ascent, passing up their weapons from hand to hand. The guards heard nothing; even the dogs were silent.
But they could not elude the vigilance of the geese which, being sacred to Juno, had not been killed in spite of the shortage of provisions. The cackling of these birds and the flapping of their wings woke Marcus Manlius, consul of three years before and a distinguished soldier, who, catching up his weapons and at the same time calling the rest to arms, strode past his bewildered comrades to a Gaul who had already got a foothold on the crest and dislodged him with a blow from the boss of his shield. As he slipped and fell, he overturned those who were next to him, and the others in alarm let go their weapons and, grasping the rocks to which they were clinging, were slain by Manlius. And now the rest had come together and were assailing the invaders with javelins and stones, and presently the whole company lost their footing and were flung down headlong to destruction.
By this time provisions in the Gallic army were running low and disease was spreading fast as choking clouds of dust and ashes from the burned buildings blew across the camp. Corpses were piled in heaps and burned on a spot afterwards known as the Gallic Pyres. An armistice was arranged; and the surviving Gauls, anxious to return home to deal with enemies on their own frontiers, accepted a money payment and withdrew.
For Rome the experience had been both devastating and humiliating, and steps were soon taken to ensure that the city was better defended in future. In place of the rampart of Servius Tullius, a new wall of volcanic stone designed by Greek engineers was constructed to enclose an area of more than a thousand acres, including all the seven hills.11 From the gates in these walls, large parts of which can still be seen today, legions marched forth in campaign after campaign, against the Aequi, the Hernici and the Volsci, the Samnites, the Umbrians and the Gauls. All were eventually overcome and pacified, and thousands of foreign people were brought to Rome as slaves and many later set free. For the time being the south of Italy remained under Greek dominion; but by 265 B.C.Rome had become master of this area too, and was the supreme power in the Italian peninsula south of the Po.
Sicily, however, remained for the moment outside the sphere of Roman influence; and Rome's interest in this island led her into conflict with Carthage, the north African maritime power whose ships and armies controlled most of the western Mediterranean. The first war with the Carthaginians lasted for over twenty years, during which the Romans lost more than five hundred ships in storms and savage sea battles. But by a treaty of 241 B.C. Rome won control over most of Sicily and later took Sardinia and Corsica as well. A second war with Carthage began in 218 B.C. and brought fearful losses upon the Roman armies at the hands of the brilliant Carthaginian general, Hannibal, who marched across the Alps with his troops and elephants and inflicted defeat after defeat upon the legions, notably at Cannae in southern Italy where over thirty thousand Roman soldiers were killed. The disaster at Cannae was avenged on the Metaurus river where Hannibal's brother, Hasdrubal, was overwhelmed; but Hannibal himself remained undefeated in Italy where his hungry army wreaked havoc in the countryside. Handicapped by a lack of siege equipment, he did not attempt to capture the city of Rome, but on several occasions during the long war the Romans expected him to do so. Once he came within sight of the walls and pitched his camp only three miles away. The Romans, with grand defiance, put up his campsite for auction; and it fetched a high price. On another occasion, fears of an attack were increased by strange portents and by the discovery in unchastity of two Vestal Virgins, one of whom was buried alive in accordance with custom, while the other killed herself. The Sybilline Books were consulted, and by their direction a Gallic man and woman and a Greek man and woman were also buried alive in the market-place. At last, in the summer of 204 B.C., a strong Roman army under a brilliant young general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, sailed across the Mediterranean to Africa. Hannibal was recalled to meet the threat and two years later was decisively defeated at Zama, south-west of Carthage. Carthaginian power was thus destroyed, and in 146 B.C., to prevent it regaining its former dominion, Carthage itself was razed to the ground and its inhabitants massacred in accordance with the persistent demands of Cato who ended his every speech in the Senate, upon whatever subject it might be, with the words, ‘And I also think that Carthage must be destroyed.’
By then Roman domination had spread not only across the Mediterranean into north Africa but across the Adriatic into Illyria, into Spain and Syria; and Macedonia had been taken over as a Roman province, a prelude to the incorporation of Greece itself as the province of Actaea.
The influence of Greek thought and culture on life in Rome was profound. Soldiers returning from the wars, officials from eastern embassies and administrators from Greek provinces came back to Rome with admiration for Greek architects and sculptors, for Greek potters and furniture makers, for Greek teachers, philosophers and writers. Soon there was scarcely an aspect of Roman life that was not influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Greek models. Greek teachers came to Rome to instruct the young in all manner of arts and accomplishments, from language and literature, rhetoric and philosophy, to wrestling and hunting, invariably addressing their pupils in Greek which remained the language of higher education long after Latin had come to be adopted as an acceptable tongue for the teaching of grammar. Greek artists also came, and the houses of the well-to-do became filled with Greek sculptures, with copies of Greek statues especially made for the Roman market, and with cameos and jewelled ornaments made by Greek slaves and freedmen. The houses themselves were designed on lines recommended by the architects of Greece. Usually built of the local Roman stone, often faced with stucco, and roofed with flanged tiles of local clay, they consisted of a number of rooms facing on to an interior courtyard, the atrium, and had another smaller, quiet courtyard at the back, laid out as a garden, surrounded by a colonnade and known as the peristylium, a word derived from the Greek.12
Greek gods, too, were imported into the Roman pantheon; existing Roman gods were identified with Greek equivalents, Jupiter with Zeus, for example, Venus with Aphrodite, Juno with Hera, Diana with Artemis, while new cults were introduced. In about 186B.C. the worship of Dionysus or Bacchus, the Greek god of wine and ecstatic liberation, became widespread in Rome; reports of the orgiastic rites indulged in by the cult's converts alarmed the Roman authorities. ‘To the religious content were added the pleasures of wine and feasting, to attract a greater number,’ reported Livy, in a highly coloured account of these Bacchanalia. ‘When they were heated with wine, and all sense of modesty had been extinguished by the darkness of night and the mingling of men with women and young with old, then debaucheries of every kind began and all had pleasures at hand to satisfy the lusts to which they were most inclined.’ It was also reported that the cult was a cover for the conspiracies of revolutionary movements, so it was decreed by the Senate that the rites could not be held without permission and could then be attended by no more than five people at a time.
To most members of the Senate, old-fashioned and respectable, it seemed by the end of the second century B.C. that the Republic was already in decline. The virtues of their ancestors, their patience and resource, frugality and industry, loyalty, discipline and deep sense of responsibility had won them independence and widespread dominion. But the cost to Rome had been great. Plunder and war indemnities had brought great riches to the city; gold and silver had poured in from Spain; from the East had come luxurious curtained beds, rich coverlets, bronze couches and gorgeous furniture of a sumptuousness never before seen in Rome. The booty had been carried, and continued to be carried, in splendid processions down the Via Sacra. The victorious general, his face painted the colour of blood, marched in a gorgeous tunic, a golden crown, too heavy for him to wear, held above his head. Following him, his proud soldiers sang songs full of ribaldry and insults to their leaders, while the long lines of captives stretched back far out of sight, the most important of them, walking for the last time in the open air, soon to be executed in the cells beneath the spurs of the Capitoline hill. Behind them the chariots clattered over the stones, followed by the wagonloads of plunder, of vestments and tapestries, of gold vessels, jewelled scabbards and works of art. Yet, whereas in the past the plunder had been reserved for the city and the honour of the gods, with only a small share for the soldiers, now the army took as much as they could lay their hands on and successful generals became men of astonishing riches.
Nor was it only plunder that came to Rome. The conquest of Sicily had resulted in such vast amounts of wheat being paid in taxes that the whole population of the city could be fed on it for a considerable part of the year; and after 167 B.C. there was no need for Roman citizens themselves to pay taxes. Bakers became commonplace, whereas formerly bread had been made at home; cooks, regarded by the ancients as the lowest sort of slave, were now much in demand, and what had been considered a servile task began to be considered a fine art. With the plunder and grain, slaves had been brought to Rome in their thousands and employed in all manner of tasks both in the workshops of the city, where they deprived free labourers of work, and beyond its walls on the farms and cattle ranches, in the vineyards and olive groves of rich Roman citizens, displacing poor country people who were forced to come to the city in what proved to be a vain search for new employment. Miserable as was the lot of these displaced peasants, that of the slaves was usually far worse. They were frequently ill used: Roman lawcourts accepted their evidence only when it had been extracted under torture; and should a slave, provoked beyond endurance by an intolerable owner, take up arms against him, all his companions in the household might well be killed outright. Cato advised that all slaves, while working, should be kept on an economical diet which excluded meat; those no longer able to do their proper work should be sold for what they would fetch. From time to time slaves seized weapons and broke out into rebellion, but these uprisings were savagely repressed.
In addition to the slaves and the discontented poor, a new class had come into prominence since the end of the wars against Carthage. These were the wealthy businessmen of Rome, known as the Equites because in the past it was they who, sufficiently well off to afford a horse, provided the cavalry of the Roman army. For the most part they did not seek political office. Indeed, to have entered the Senate would have entailed the abandonment of their principal sources of income, since Senators and their sons had to rely for their income on their landed estates, and such activities as brick and tile making, which was conveniently considered a branch of agriculture; they were forbidden to compete for government contracts, to lend money or to own ships large enough for overseas trade.
The senatorial class itself, however, was also changing. A new elite known as the Optimates had emerged. These were the ‘best men’ who prided themselves not so much upon the distinction and length of their family trees, but upon the number of their ancestors who had achieved high office in the Republic. Their houses were filled with death-masks of distinguished forebears, and with busts and statues to remind themselves and their guests of the part their families had played in the creation of Rome. On ceremonial occasions, and particularly at funerals, these busts were borne aloft by respectful servants, death-masks were worn by actors who also put on the robes and carried the insignia of high office, and orations were made in honour of the family's name, more often perpetuating myths than recounting verifiable fact. Conservative, and in many cases reactionary, the Optimates agreed with Cicero, who had Scipio Aemilianus declare in The Republic that ‘of all forms of government, there is none which by constitution, in theory or in practice, can be compared with that which our fathers left us and which had previously been left to them by their ancestors’. They firmly upheld the supremacy of the Senate and maintained that the People's Assembly should always follow the Senate's lead and take its sensible advice.
Politically opposed to the Optimates were the Populares, not, as their name might imply, a proletarian group, but mostly men from old senatorial families who were nevertheless in favour of constitutional, judicial and land reforms. They were supported by the Equites who saw much virtue in the proposals for reform advocated by Tiberius Gracchus, a young aristocrat who was elected Tribune for the People for the year 133 B.C. But Gracchus's provocative plans so alarmed the Optimates that soon after his election he was murdered at the door of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Three hundred of his supporters were clubbed to death and their bodies thrown into the Tiber. Tiberius's brother, Gaius Gracchus, a fine orator, subtle yet passionate, endeavoured to carry on his brother's work as a reformer. For a time he seemed on the verge of success but his plans to grant full Roman citizenship to most Italians, and thus to allow outsiders to share the Romans' free circuses, their cheap grain and the bribes they enjoyed for placing their votes in the People's Assembly, lost him the support of the Roman people. And in 121 B.C. he, too, was defeated. Forced to flee for his life, he reached the wooden bridge across the river and, there, on the point of capture, he presented his throat to a faithful slave who had accompanied him. No less than three thousand of his supporters were afterwards executed without trial.
Political differences in Rome had ended in unprecedented violence. The poor were more deeply antagonistic than ever towards the rich, and the Roman Republic was in its early death throes. At this time there rose to prominence a man from outside the governing class, a tough, crudely outspoken soldier named Gaius Marius who refused to learn Greek on the grounds that it was absurd to use a language which had to be taught by a subject race, and who had grown rich as a businessman and extorter of taxes. He had served with distinction against a royal rebel in north Africa and against German tribes on the northern Italian frontiers; and, by recruiting troops irrespective of their property qualifications, had created a new kind of army, no longer composed of citizens fulfilling a civic duty, but of volunteers without other means of support who, after fighting under the silver eagles, the emblems of Rome, remained loyal to the general who could provide for them rather than to the Senate which distrusted them.
This transference of the legions' loyalty was to have profound consequences in the future; but for the moment the fears of the Senate were concentrated not so much upon the army but upon a war in Italy provoked by the rage of Rome's Italian allies who, after all they had done to secure victory in north Africa and against the German tribes, were still denied Roman citizenship, a privilege which Gaius Gracchus and his followers had attempted to procure for them. This war was known as the Social War (after socii, allies); in it Rome had to face not only the armies of her former allies but also of such peoples as the Samnites who, still resenting their defeats so many generations earlier, were demanding not citizenship of Rome but independence from it. The war lasted until 87 B.C.and according to the retired army officer, Velleius Paterculus, it ‘carried off more than three hundred thousand of the youth of Italy’ before the Senate felt obliged to grant concessions. Even then peace did not come to Rome. Marius had walked off in dudgeon when not given supreme command, allowing his former staff officer, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a rich patrician of skill and cunning, to enhance a reputation almost as great as that of Marius himself; and when Mithridates VI, a swashbuckling king in Asia Minor, began to expand his kingdom at the expense of Rome's allies, provinces and client states in the East, Sulla was given command of the Roman army. But this appointment was immediately cancelled at the instigation of Marius's supporters who appointed him in Sulla's place. Refusing to accept his supersession, Sulla left Rome to take command of the legions waiting to sail for Asia Minor, marched them back to the city, declared Marius an outlaw and forced him to go into hiding in north Africa. Marius, however, did not remain there long. As soon as Sulla had set sail to fight Mithridates in Greece, Marius returned to Italy to assemble an army from amongst his old soldiers; and, with another ambitious general, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, he marched upon Rome to wreak revenge upon Sulla's supporters there. He did so with the utmost ferocity, slaughtering his principal enemies and allowing his soldiers and slaves to murder, rape and plunder. But in 86 B.C., soon after he had had himself elected consul for the seventh time, he died insane, leaving his colleague, Cinna, to rule alone until he was killed in a mutiny two years later as he was preparing to lead an army against Sulla, who was still in Greece.
In 82 B.C. Sulla appeared in Italy once more and, overwhelming an army which the Senate, now controlled by Populares, had sent out to block his entry into Rome, he stormed into the city, massacring his enemies on a scale which even Marius had not attempted. His personal bodyguard disposed of almost 10,000 citizens, among them forty Senators, as many as 1,600 of the Equites and countless numbers of lesser citizens whose possessions Sulla's men appropriated. Sulla then appointed himself Dictator and rewarded 100,000 of his soldiers with lands taken from the families of the slain.
For the next two years this man, whose complexion was so pitted and blotched that it was said to resemble a mulberry scattered with oatmeal, personally controlled the government of Rome. In the interests of the Optimates, he passed a succession of conservative laws, restoring the power of the oligarchic Senate and destroying that of the Tribunes of the People. He also embarked upon an ambitious programme of public works in the city, sponsoring the construction of a new Senate House13 and of the Tabularium, the State Record Office.14 He married his fifth wife, ‘a very beautiful woman of a most distinguished family’ who, like himself, was recently divorced. Nevertheless, according to Plutarch, ‘he still kept company with women who were ballet dancers or harpists and with people from the theatre’.
They used to be drinking together on couches all day long. Those who were at this time most influential with him were the following: Roscius the comedian, Gorex the leading ballet dancer, and Metrobius the female impersonator. Metrobius was now past his prime, but Sulla throughout everything continued to insist that he was in love with him. By living in this way he aggravated a disease which had not been serious in its early stages and for a long time he was not aware that he had ulcers in his intestines. This resulted in his whole flesh being corrupted and turning into worms. Many people were employed day and night in removing these worms, but they increased far more quickly than they could be removed. Indeed, they came swarming out in such numbers that all his clothing, baths, hand-basins and food became infected with the corruption. He tried to clean and scour himself by having frequent baths throughout the day; but it was no use; the flesh changed into worms too quickly.
In 79 B.C. Sulla suddenly retired to Campania where he died a year later. The diseased body was brought back to Rome and laid upon a funeral pyre.
Then a strong wind came up and blew upon the pyre, raising a huge flame. They just had time to collect the bones, while the pyre was smouldering and the fire nearly out, when rain began to fall heavily and continued falling until night. It would seem, then, that his good fortune never left him and indeed actually took part in his funeral. His monument is in the Field of Mars and they say that the inscription on it is one that he wrote himself. The substance of it is that he had not been outdone by any of his friends in doing good nor by any of his enemies in doing harm.
Soon after Sulla's death Italy was racked by another outbreak of savage violence which threatened to cost as many lives as the recent wars. It began in a barracks at Capua where captives, mostly Thracians and Gauls, were kept in appalling conditions and trained as gladiators. One day about eighty of these men broke out, armed themselves, first with spits and choppers from the cookhouse, then with gladiators' weapons from a convoy of wagons on its way to another city, and in the wild country of Lucania, south-east of Naples, defeated a small army of legionaries sent out against them from Rome. Slaves joined the gladiators, as did discontented herdsmen and shepherds, until their leader, Spartacus, a Thracian of high intelligence and some culture, had a formidable and well-armed multitude at his command. Spartacus would have taken them north across the Alps where they could have obtained their freedom. But, having defeated four armies, his men supposed themselves invincible and were content to remain in Italy ravaging the
2. Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey The Great), the highly gifted and arrogant statesman and general, who was defeated by Julius Caesar on the plain of Pharsalus in 48 B.C.
countryside. In 71 B.C., however, Spartacus was at last overwhelmed in Apulia, and six thousand of his followers were crucified along the Appian Way.
The Roman general who brought about this defeat was the enormously rich Marcus Licinius Crassus, an ingratiating and avaricious officer, who was assisted in the later stages of the campaign by another gifted and ambitious commander, the arrogant Cnaeus Pompeius, afterwards known as Pompey the Great, who took much of the credit for Spartacus's defeat. Pompey and Crassus might well have come to blows; but, both recognizing the advantages of cooperation, they agreed to demand to be elected consuls for the year 70 B.C. though neither, as commanders of armies in the field, was eligible for election and Pompey was additionally disqualified on the grounds of his youth. After their election, Crassus remained in Rome, increasing his fortunes and political standing, while Pompey sought further glory, first in the Mediterranean where, with a navy of five hundred ships, he stamped out the pirates whose insolent operations were interfering with Rome's grain supply, then in western Asia where, in the process of creating new provinces and dependent states and in founding new cities, he not only redrew the map of Rome's dominions beyond the Ionian Sea but also became even richer than Crassus. When he returned to Rome he was welcomed with a Triumph, the third he had been accorded, more magnificent than any the city had seen. Two whole days were set aside for it, yet even so there was not enough time to include all the spectacles prepared. At the head of the procession were carried placards with the names of the countries which the hero had brought within Rome's orbit, banners indicating the huge amounts of money these lands would bring to Rome in taxes, and standards inscribed with Pompey's victories over the pirates. Then came parades of priests and musicians, dancers and jesters; then sad, straggling lines of manacled prisoners, rows of pirate chiefs, and, as Plutarch listed them, ‘the wife and son and daughter of King Tigranes of Armenia, Aristobulus King of the Jews, a sister and five children of Mithridates, some Scythian women, hostages given by the Iberians, by the Albanians and the King of Comnagene. There were also great numbers of trophies, one for every battle in which Pompey had been victorious… But what seemed the greatest glory of all and one quite unprecedented in Roman history was that this third Triumph of his was over a third continent. Others before him had celebrated three Triumphs; but Pompey's first had been over Libya, his second over Europe, and now this last was over Asia, so that he seemed in a sense to have led the whole world captive.’
There had been fears in Rome that this great hero might establish an unlimited dictatorship as Sulla had done, and in his absence groups of patricians had intrigued with each other in efforts to prevent it. Among them was a corrupt, charming and devious candidate for the consulship, the radical Lucius Sergius Catilina. So widespread were the suspicions aroused by this shady and unprincipled character that a rival candidate, whose relatively humble origins had proved an insurmountable obstacle to the ambitions of less gifted men, was brought into prominence.
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the son of a retired country gentleman, none of whose ancestors had ever been Consul and whose pretensions to high office would, therefore, normally have been regarded by the Optimates as unbecoming in a so-called ‘new man’. But Cicero's gifts as an orator were quite exceptional; and by dint of constant, eager practice in the Forum, where he fluently pleaded cases in his supremely eloquent Latin before the Roman courts and deeply impressed the crowds who came to hear him, he had at the age of twenty-nine been elected Quaestor, and in 63 B.C., before he was forty-four, he had become Consul.
His disappointed, embittered rival, Catilina, endeavoured to gain the consulship the next year by promising all manner of sweeping reforms; but he was again defeated, and now, despairing of gaining power by conventional means, turned his thoughts to an insurrection by the discontented and the seizure of power in a coup d'état. When Cicero heard rumours of this plot he acted decisively by ordering the immediate arrest of the conspirators. Catilina himself had fled from Rome and was subsequently killed near Pistoia. But five of his accomplices were brought before the Senate. Cicero argued persuasively and brilliantly for the death sentence and, having got his way, went out to the waiting crowds to announce to tremendous cheers, ‘Vixerunt!’, ‘They are dead!’ He had been strongly supported in his arguments by Marcus Porcius Cato, a man as implacable and as rigid in his advocacy of Rome's antique traditions as his great-grandfather. Opposing him had been a young, recently elected Praetor, Gaius Julius Caesar.