CHAPTER III
The rise of Rome was due, more than anything else, to the character and qualities of the Romans themselves. They were a simple, straightforward, law-abiding people with a strong sense of family values, willing to accept discipline when required to do so–as they certainly had been in 510 BC when they expelled the Tarquins, that line of Etruscan kings who had ruled them for the previous century,14 and established a republic of their own. Their city, they claimed, predated the Etruscans by many centuries; it had originally been founded by the Trojan prince Aeneas, who had made his way to Italy after the Greeks’ destruction of his city. Rome was thus the successor to ancient Troy.
In 280 BC, an ambitious ruler of a Hellenistic state in northwestern Greece, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, landed with an army estimated at 20,000 at Tarentum (the modern Taranto). The Roman army met him near Heraclea, where it was narrowly beaten, Pyrrhus’s losses being almost as great as the Romans’: thus the concept of a Pyrrhic victory was born. For the next five years the King continued to make trouble, but with less and less success; finally, in 275 BC, having lost some two-thirds of his army, he returned to Epirus. Rome, a still obscure republic in central Italy, had defeated a Hellenistic king. The subsequent triumphal procession in the capital featured Pyrrhus’s captured elephants–the first to make their appearance in Italy.15
But Rome’s greatest enemy was Carthage, originally a colony of the Phoenicians, which occupied part of the site of the modern city of Tunis. The Carthaginians were a thorn in the Roman flesh for well over a hundred years, from 264 to 146 BC, during which the Romans were obliged to fight two separate Punic Wars16 before they were able to eliminate it forever. It was these two wars that brought Rome to the centre of the Mediterranean stage and–since it soon became clear that Carthage could never be defeated on land alone–made her a leading sea power. The first, which ended in 241 BC, had one extremely happy result for Rome: the acquisition of the greater part of Sicily, which would henceforth constitute her principal granary. (Corsica and Sardinia were to follow three years later.) She had greater cause for concern, however, during the twenty-three-year interval that elapsed before the beginning of the second, because during that period Carthage succeeded in establishing a whole new empire–this time in Spain.
The Phoenicians had first reached the Iberian peninsula around 1100 BC, when they founded the port of Cadiz. It was in those days an island and it set the pattern for subsequent Phoenician colonies, all of which tended to be positioned on promontories or offshore islands, often at a river mouth, presumably–since, like all merchants, they were a peaceful lot–in order not to encroach more than necessary on the natives. Of these last the most advanced were the Iberians, a mysterious people whose two languages are, like the Etruscan, not Indo-European and, unlike the Etruscan, continue to baffle us. The Iberians traded enthusiastically with the Phoenicians, with whom they seem to have existed on friendly terms. Some centuries later they were to develop a remarkable civilisation of their own, notable above all for its statuary: the so-called Dama de Elche, dating from the fourth century BC and now in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, is one of the most beautiful–and most haunting–ancient sculptures to be seen anywhere.
In about 237 BC Hamilcar Barca, Carthage’s most distinguished general–or admiral, since he seems to have been equally at home on land and at sea–set off for the Iberian peninsula, taking with him his little son Hannibal, aged nine. Here, over the space of just eight years, he built up all the infrastructure of a prosperous state, with a sizable army to defend it. Accidentally drowned in 229 BC, he was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who established the permanent capital of Carthaginian Spain at what the Romans called New Carthage and we call Cartagena. He also did much to develop the art of mining: a single mine, Baebelo, was said to produce 300 pounds of silver a day. When Hasdrubal was assassinated by an Iberian slave in 221 BC, his place was taken by Hannibal, now twenty-six.
Hannibal was to prove the greatest military leader the world had seen since Alexander; indeed, he may well have been one of the greatest of all time. According to tradition, his father had made him swear eternal hatred of Rome; he was determined from the moment of his accession to avenge his country’s defeat of twenty years before, and confident that the new Spanish dominion, with all its vast resources of wealth and manpower, would enable him to do so. He left Spain in the spring of 218 BC with an army of some 40,000 men, taking the land route along the south coast of France, up the Rhône valley, then east to Briançon and the pass at Mont-Genèvre. His infantry was mostly Spanish, though officered by Carthaginians, his cavalry drawn from Spain and North Africa; it included thirty-seven elephants. His famous crossing of the Alps took place in the early autumn and was followed by two victorious battles in quick succession; by the end of the year he controlled virtually the whole of northern Italy. But then the momentum began to fail. He had counted on a general rising of the Italian cities, uneasy as they were at the growing power of Rome, but he was disappointed; even a third victory in April 217 BC, when he trapped the Roman army in a defile between Lake Trasimene and the surrounding hills, proved ultimately ineffective. It was no use his marching on Rome; the city possessed formidable defensive walls, and he had no siege engines worth speaking of. He therefore swung round to Apulia and Calabria, where the largely Greek populations had no love for the Romans and might well, he thought, defect to his side.
Once again he was wrong. Instead of the sympathetic allies for which he had hoped, he soon found himself faced by yet another Roman army, far larger and better equipped than his own, which had followed him southward; and on 3 August 216 BC, at Cannae (beside the Ofanto river, some ten miles southwest of the modern Barletta) battle was joined. The result was another victory for Hannibal, perhaps the greatest of his life, and for the Romans the most devastating defeat in their history. Thanks to his superb generalship, the legionaries found themselves surrounded and were cut to pieces where they stood. By the end of the day over 50,000 of them lay dead on the field. Hannibal’s casualties amounted to just 5,700.
Hannibal had now destroyed all Rome’s fighting forces apart from those kept within the capital for its defence; but he was no nearer his ultimate objective, the destruction of the Republic. His strongest weapon, that magnificent Spanish and North African cavalry–by now strictly equine, since the elephants had all succumbed to the cold and damp–was powerless against the city walls. He was encouraged, on the other hand, by the hope that his brother–another Hasdrubal–might be raising a second army, this time with proper siege engines, and joining him as soon as it was ready. Then, to his surprise, he found in Campania–that province of Italy south of Rome of which Naples is the centre–just that degree of popular support that seemed to be lacking elsewhere in the peninsula. Marching his army across the mountains to Capua, at that time Italy’s second largest city, he established his headquarters there and settled down to wait.
He waited a very long time, for Hasdrubal had problems of his own. The Romans, swift to take advantage of Hannibal’s absence, had within months of his departure invaded Spain, with a force of two legions and some 15,000 allied troops under a young general named Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who was soon joined by his brother Publius. The immediate consequence of this invasion was a long struggle between Roman and Carthaginian forces, with the local Iberians fighting on both sides; the eventual result was a Roman presence in the peninsula which lasted over six centuries. After the death of the two Scipios in 211 BC they were replaced by a kinsman, also called Publius, who took Cartagena after a short siege. With the capture of their capital the Carthaginians swiftly lost heart, and by 206 BC the last of them had left the peninsula.
While there had been a hope of victory over the Romans in Spain, Hasdrubal had had no chance of organising a relief expedition to help his brother. Not until 206 BC, when he knew he was beaten, could he begin to consider such an enterprise, and when in 205 he in turn led his men across southern France and across the Alps, he was marching to disaster: on the Metaurus river, just outside Ancona, he encountered a Roman army and his force was cut to pieces. Hannibal learned the news only when his brother’s severed head was delivered to his Capuan camp. He remained in Italy for another four years, but he would have been wiser to return; elsewhere in the Mediterranean, young Publius Cornelius Scipio had by now taken the offensive.
In 204 BC Publius and his army landed on the North African coast at Utica, less than twenty miles west of Carthage, where they routed 20,000 local troops and established a position on the Bay of Tunis threatening the city itself. In the spring of 203 Hannibal, now seriously alarmed, hurried back to Carthage and in the following year led an army of 37,000 men and eighty elephants against the Roman invaders. The two sides eventually met near the village of Zama where, after a long and hard-fought battle, Hannibal suffered the only major defeat of his extraordinary career. It was at Zama, we are told, that the Romans finally discovered how to deal with the Carthaginians’ favourite tactical weapon, their elephants. First a sudden blast of trumpets would terrify them, to the point where their riders lost control; the Romans would then open their ranks, and the panic-stricken animals would charge between them, out of what they thought to be harm’s way. The Roman victory was complete. The Second Punic War was over. Rome’s prize for her victory was Spain. All the carefully built-up Carthaginian military and civil administration had already been dismantled–the Scipios had seen to that–and now it remained only for Carthage formally to cede the peninsula to her conquerors. Hannibal himself–who had narrowly escaped death at Zama–lived on until 183 BC, when he took poison to avoid being captured by the enemy he so hated. As for the victorious Scipio, he was rewarded with the title of ‘Africanus’, which he richly deserved. He, more than any other of his compatriots, had ensured that it was Rome, not Carthage, which would be mistress of the Mediterranean in the centuries that followed.
But the Punic Wars had had a traumatic effect. They had brought the Roman Republic several times to the brink of disaster and had in all claimed the lives of perhaps two or three hundred thousand of her men. And yet there, across the narrow sea, the city of Carthage still stood–its population of some 750,000 unharmed, industrious and enterprising, recovering from its recent defeat with almost frightening speed: to every patriotic Roman a reminder, a reproach and a continuing threat. Clearly, its survival could not be tolerated. ‘Delenda est Carthago’ (‘Carthage is to be deleted’): these words were spoken by the elder Cato at the end of every speech he made in the Senate until they eventually became a watchword; the only question was how the job was to be done. At last, in 151BC, an excuse was found when the Carthaginians presumed to defend their city from the depredations of a local chieftain. Rome treated this very natural reaction as a casus belli, and in 149 BC once again sent out an invading army. This time the Carthaginians surrendered unconditionally–until they heard the Roman peace terms, which were that their city should be utterly destroyed and that its inhabitants should not be permitted to rebuild their homes anywhere within ten miles of the sea. Appalled, they decided after all to resist. The result was a terrible two-year siege, after which, in 146 BC, the threatened destruction took place, not one stone being left on another. Cato was obeyed: Carthage was deleted.
The Kingdom of Pontus–a hitherto somewhat insignificant state lying along the southern shore of the Black Sea–should have no place in a history of the Mediterranean. Nor would it have had but for its young king Mithridates VI, who for twenty-five years was the principal thorn in the flesh of the Roman Republic. Although by race he and his subjects were Persian, he always liked to think of himself as a Greek, a proud champion of Hellenism who would inspire all the Greek cities to rise up against their Latin oppressors. In 88 BC he invaded the Roman province of Asia17 and engineered a mass uprising which ended in a massacre of some 80,000 Italian residents; then, emboldened by this success, he crossed the Aegean and occupied Athens. Several other Greek cities fell to him in their turn.
Clearly, Rome had to act; and the Roman Senate chose as supreme commander of its expeditionary force a fifty-year-old patrician by the name of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, possessed of a fine military record and a first-hand knowledge of Asia. Just as he was about to embark, however, the democratic faction in the Senate successfully moved that he be replaced by an old and somewhat decayed general under whom he had once served, Gaius Marius. It was a disastrous decision, and Sulla categorically refused to accept it. With his army behind him to a man, he marched on Rome, liquidated his enemies and, without more ado, set off for Greece. He stormed Athens, destroyed its port of Piraeus, won two decisive victories in the field and eventually concluded a peace treaty with Mithridates–though on what to many seemed surprisingly easy terms. All this, however, he had achieved without any semblance of authority from the government in Rome–where, in his absence, the Marian party had returned to power.
Hastening back to the capital, Sulla routed them for the second time and assumed the role of dictator, unhesitatingly ordering the mass murder of nearly 10,000 of his political enemies, including forty senators and some 1,600 equites, or knights. He then passed a series of highly reactionary laws which had the effect of putting back the clock by at least half a century. Finally, with this work successfully completed, he abdicated and returned to his home in Campania. Here he led an extremely dissolute life, terrorising his many slaves. From time to time–pour encourager les autres, perhaps–he would sentence one or two of them to death, usually taking care to be present when the sentence was carried out; but one day in 78 BC, while he was watching a strangulation, the excitement became too much for him. He suffered a sudden seizure and died soon afterwards.
The next forty years were dominated by the three military men who, even more than Sulla before them, were to put their indelible mark on republican Rome. They were Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to us as Pompey), Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gaius Julius Caesar. Pompey had won victories for Sulla–to whose stepdaughter he was married–in Sicily and North Africa, for which services he had been grudgingly granted the rare privilege of a Triumph.18 Unlike most noble Romans of his day he had little interest in money, and politics bored him stiff. What he liked was power. He was a soldier through and through, and a highly ambitious one.
Crassus, the second of the three giants, could hardly have been more different. Born rich, he had made himself still richer by clever if unscrupulous wheeling and dealing in the Roman property market. He too was a first-rate general when he wanted to be, but while Pompey was forever seeking means to enhance his already formidable military reputation Crassus preferred to stay in Rome, intriguing behind the scenes for his own political and financial ends. His one major military achievement was in putting down a slave revolt which broke out in 73 BC. Having first pursued its leader, Spartacus, through Calabria, he finally caught up with him in Apulia, where he executed him on the spot. Six thousand rebel slaves were subsequently crucified, their crosses lining the Appian Way.
Pompey, who had been absent in Spain–where he founded the city of Pamplona and named it after himself–returned just in time for the crucifixions, in which he participated with enthusiasm; characteristically, he then attempted to take the credit for the entire operation. As can be readily understood, Crassus was furious. Each had an army behind him, and for a moment it looked as if the Republic was once again to be plunged into civil war; fortunately the rivals came to a last-minute understanding: the two would present themselves for election to the consulship in the year 70 BC. Strictly speaking, neither of them was eligible, neither having disbanded his army as consular candidates were required to do. Pompey, moreover–who was still only thirty-six–had not even taken his seat as a senator. But the Senate had not the courage to stand up against two such men, and they were duly elected. They spent their year of office meticulously undoing all Sulla’s legislation.
In the years that followed, while Crassus remained busy in Rome–occupied with an interminable quarrel with the Senate over tax collections in Asia–Pompey went from strength to strength. In 67 BC, with 120,000 men and 500 ships and in only sixty days, he virtually eliminated the pirates who had long plagued the Mediterranean, thus making the seas safe for the best part of a thousand years. He was then despatched to the east, where the King of Pontus was up to his old tricks. Unfortunately for Pompey, Mithridates committed suicide before battle could be joined, but there was plenty of other work to be done in eastern lands before he returned home. Without bothering to consult the Senate, he rapidly annexed Pontus; moving south to Syria, he expelled the last Seleucid king and made this too a province, thereby acquiring for Rome the great city of Antioch. Finally he pressed on to Judaea, where he captured Jerusalem–sensibly allowing the reigning king to remain on his throne as a ‘client’ of Rome. All this he accomplished in just four years, during which it is not too much to say that he changed the face of the Near East more radically than at any other time until the coming of Islam.
When Pompey returned to Rome in 62 BC it was as a conquering hero. He was granted a second Triumph, far more splendid than the first. Many Romans trembled, remembering the return of Sulla just twenty years before, but the triumphator disbanded his troops, asking nothing but the ratification of all that he had done in the east and a grant of land on which his veteran soldiers could settle. Both requests seemed reasonable enough; with regard to the first, he had indeed acted without authority, but the slowness of communications in those days had left him no alternative. In any case Rome’s gains had been immense; the Romans had little cause to complain.
Complain, however, they did. One of the principal critics of Pompey’s actions was Crassus, clearly motivated by personal jealousy of his old rival. The two most powerful men in Rome were now at loggerheads, both with the government and with each other.
The third and greatest member of this astonishing triumvirate19 now appears on the scene. In 62 BC Gaius Julius Caesar was thirty-eight, and married to Sulla’s granddaughter Pompeia (he was to divorce her in the following year).20 His reputation in Rome was that of a cultivated intellectual and a formidable orator in the Senate, a provider of lavish entertainments who was consequently always in debt, and a sexual profligate, whose affairs–with both men and women–were legion but who had nevertheless been elected Pontifex Maximus, chief of the priesthood of the Roman state: talented, fascinating, but basically unreliable. In 60 BC he returned from Spain, where he had been serving as governor and where, after a few insignificant victories, he too had been promised a Triumph. But now there arose a difficulty. He was determined to gain the consulship; to announce his candidature, however, he would be obliged to appear in Rome long before the Triumph could be arranged, and by doing so he would forfeit his right to the ceremony. He tried to solve the problem by formally requesting that the announcement be made by proxy; when this was refused, he hesitated no longer. Plans for the Triumph were put aside. He came straight to Rome. Power was more important than glory.
But now there came a further blow. It had long been the custom in Rome to allocate to its prospective consuls, even before they took office, the provinces which they would be sent to govern at the end of their term; the Senate, knowing that it could not hope to prevent Caesar’s election but determined at least to cut him down to size, allotted to him no provinces worthy of the name, but simply ‘the forests and cattle-runs of Italy’. This was certainly a deliberate snub; and Caesar certainly took it as such.
The Senate had now succeeded in antagonising the three most powerful men in Rome, and since Caesar remained on excellent terms with Pompey and Crassus it was hardly surprising that he should have approached the two men with a proposal for a coalition. In return for their support he would give both what they wanted, so long as neither raised an objection and on condition that they refrained also from squabbling with each other. He was as good as his word. His fellow consul, a colourless figure laughably named Bibulus, withdrew to his house ‘to watch the sky for omens’; Caesar simply ignored him. He rewarded Pompey’s veterans with the land they wanted and ensured the ratification of his achievements in the east, and was delighted when Pompey–who had by now divorced his first wife–asked for the hand of his daughter Julia. Where Crassus was concerned, the little matter of the tax-gathering was also quickly settled. Meanwhile, with the help of his new allies, Caesar had personally allocated to himself two real provinces to govern when his consulate was over: Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and Illyricum (Dalmatia). As it happened, the news arrived at that moment of the sudden death of the governor of Transalpine Gaul, which covered most of modern France. Here was an opportunity indeed: he took that over as well.
After his consulship Caesar left at once for Gaul, where he was to remain for the next eight years; by the time he returned to Rome he had conquered the entire country. Plutarch estimates that a million Gauls lost their lives, with another million enslaved; far more important to Caesar himself, he had built up a military reputation which put even Pompey in the shade, showing himself to be one of the supreme commanders of all time. His mind worked like lightning and could adapt instantly to a changing situation; his timing was faultless. Physically too, he possessed almost incredible energy and powers of endurance, often travelling a hundred miles in a light carriage in a single day, in spite of appalling weather and execrable roads.
Back in Rome, although Pompey and Crassus were still in charge, their authority was rapidly weakening thanks to the intrigues and machinations of Publius Clodius Pulcher–he who had infiltrated the Bona Dea ceremony. Clodius had by now revealed himself as a dangerously radical demagogue, whose activities were becoming a serious threat to the state. Determined that their triumvirate should be preserved, the three met in 56 BC at Lucca, a city just inside Cisalpine Gaul–Caesar being aware that a number of irregularities during his consulship might well render him liable to prosecution if he set foot on Roman territory. There, by dividing the Roman world into three separate spheres of influence–east to Crassus, centre to Caesar, west to Pompey–they decided how best their several ambitions could be fulfilled. Pompey and Crassus would stand for the consulship for the second time in the following year; after that Crassus–who was beginning to feel overshadowed by the other two and was determined to prove himself in battle–would lead an expedition beyond the Euphrates against the Parthian Empire, now the only substantial nation confronting Rome anywhere in the world. Pompey would take over a five-year responsibility for Spain–governing it, however, for most of the time through subordinates so that he could remain in Rome as effective head of the administration. As for Caesar, he would have his Gallic command extended for another five years so that he could extend and consolidate his conquests.21
But the partnership’s inevitable stresses and strains were beginning to tell. In 54 BC Julia died in childbirth; she had done much to hold her father and husband together, and with her death they drifted apart. Then, in 53 BC, away in the east, the army of Crassus suffered an overwhelming defeat by Parthian mounted archers at Carrhae (the modern Harran, in southeast Turkey). Of the 6,000 Roman legionaries engaged, 5,500 were killed, and when Crassus went to negotiate peace terms he was killed too. Pompey and Caesar were left alone, each becoming more and more aware of the fact that Rome was not big enough for both of them, and when Pompey rejected Caesar’s suggestion of another marriage tie between their two families, taking instead as his third wife the daughter of Caesar’s enemy Metellus Scipio, whom he then made his fellow consul, it was clear that matters were coming to a head. Pompey, moreover, had the distinct advantage: he was in Rome.
But Rome was fast declining into anarchy. Although Pompey enjoyed more authority than anyone else, he had almost as many enemies in high places as Caesar, and he was increasingly unable to control the rival gangs of Clodius and his principal adversary, Milo, who divided the streets between them. Then in 52 BC Clodius was murdered and Pompey was made sole consul, with special emergency powers to enable him to restore order in the city; two years later it was moved in the Senate that Caesar should be relieved of his command. The motion was blocked by an energetic young tribune named Curio, one of Caesar’s most ardent supporters, but the stalemate continued. Curio then proposed that both Caesar and Pompey should simultaneously resign their posts, and it was when this proposal too was rejected that one of the consuls then in office called on Pompey to take command of all the forces of the Republic–effectively assuming dictatorial powers. Pompey accepted–on condition, as he put it, that no better way could be found–and immediately took over two legions that happened to be in the capital.
Curio set off at once with the news to Caesar’s headquarters at Ravenna, then returned to Rome–completing the 140-mile journey in three days–with a letter in which Caesar detailed his immense services to the state and insisted that if he must indeed relinquish his command, Pompey must do the same. The Senate, however, could hardly be persuaded even to have it read; instead they supported a motion by Metellus Scipio (now Pompey’s father-in-law) that Caesar must resign unilaterally or be declared a public enemy. The die, as Caesar himself declared, was cast; and on the night of 10 January 49 BC he and the single legion he had taken with him crossed the little river Rubicon,22 which constituted the southeastern border of Cisalpine Gaul. In doing so he deliberately flouted the Roman law which forbade a governor to lead an army outside his province, thereby incurring a charge of treason. Henceforth it would be a trial of strength: a civil war.
That war was to be fought on several fronts. In Italy Caesar encountered little opposition. Town after town opened its gates to him without a struggle; when he was called upon to fight, his battle-hardened troops were more than a match for any that might be ranged against them. Only two months after the Rubicon crossing the two consuls fled to Dalmatia, where they were shortly joined by Pompey himself. Caesar did not pursue them at once, since they remained in control of the Adriatic; instead he set off by land to Spain, the heartland of Pompey’s power in the west. On the way he stopped briefly at the free city of Massilia (Marseille) and, finding the population loyal to Pompey, placed it under siege, finally crossing the Pyrenees with an army of 40,000 men. Against him were not less than 70,000, commanded by three of Pompey’s leading generals, but he effortlessly outmanoeuvred them until, finding themselves encircled, they capitulated without further resistance. By the time he returned to Massilia that city too had surrendered. Now at last he was ready for the final round of the struggle.
With his enemies satisfactorily scattered, Caesar had no difficulty in having himself elected consul once again in 48 BC. He then pursued Pompey, who had by this time gone on to Greece. An attempt to blockade Pompey’s key base and bridgehead at Dyrrachium (now Durrës in Albania) was a failure, but 200 miles away to the southwest, on 9 August 48 BC on the sweltering plain of Pharsalus in Thessaly, the two armies met at last. Caesar–aided by the young tribune Mark Antony, who commanded his left wing–once again won an easy victory. Pompey, we are told, was one of the first to retreat. He escaped to the coast and thence to Egypt, whose boy king Ptolemy XIII had been his staunch supporter, supplying him with ships and provisions; but Ptolemy was anxious to be on the winning side, and when Caesar, in hot pursuit of his enemy, arrived in turn at Alexandria it was to find that Pompey had been assassinated.
Caesar’s journey, on the other hand, had not been in vain; Ptolemy had recently banished his twenty-one-year-old half-sister, wife and co-ruler, Cleopatra, and arbitration was urgently needed. In this case it took a somewhat unusual form: Cleopatra returned secretly to Egypt to plead her case, whereupon Caesar–now fifty-two–instantly seduced her and took her into his palace as his mistress. Ptolemy, furious, laid the palace under siege, but a Roman relief force soon came to the rescue and in March 47 BC defeated the Egyptians in battle. Ptolemy fled and was drowned, appropriately enough, in the Nile; Caesar established Cleopatra on the throne with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV, as her co-ruler, Egypt becoming a client state of Rome. He himself had one further task before he returned to the capital: the proper chastisement of Pharnaces, son of that old troublemaker Mithridates of Pontus, who was showing every sign of taking after his father. With seven legions he marched quickly northwards through Syria and Anatolia. The expedition was very nearly a disaster. At Zela (the modern Zile) in central Anatolia, on 2 August, just as the Roman army was pitching its camp, Pharnaces attacked. The legions were taken by surprise; only their discipline and experience won the day. It was then, Plutarch tells us, that Caesar reported his victory back to Rome with the words which used to be known to every English schoolboy: veni, vidi, vici–‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’23
Pompey was dead, but his two sons remained undefeated and there were two more campaigns to be fought–the first in North Africa, the second in Spain–before the civil war could be considered properly at an end. As always, Caesar now faced the problem of finding land on which to settle the legionaries who had served him so well. He established several colonies in Italy, and–since there was not enough territory available in the peninsula to accommodate all his men–well over forty others in provinces overseas, Corinth and Carthage among them. Nor were these colonies intended for war veterans alone; some 80,000 of the Roman unemployed were sent to join them. Thus were the seeds sown for the long-term Romanisation of the Mediterranean coastline, so much of which bears the Roman stamp to this day.
Julius Caesar was now supreme. He had packed the Senate with 900 of his own creatures, many of whom were obliged to him for favours received and all of whom he could trust to give him their support. Through them he controlled the state; through the state, the civilised world. Meanwhile, a cult of personality–the first Rome had known–was growing up around him. Portrait busts were widely distributed, both in Italy and abroad; his image even appeared on coins, an unheard-of innovation. None of this, however, added to his popularity. With all the power gathered into his own hands, the way was blocked to ambitious young politicians, who grew more and more to resent his arrogance, his capriciousness and–not least–his immense wealth. They also resented his frequent long absences on campaign, which they considered unnecessary and irresponsible. He was after all fifty-six years old, and known to be epileptic; future wars should surely be left to his generals. The truth was that Caesar hated the capital, with its perpetual petty lobbyings and intrigues; he was only really happy when out on campaign with his legionaries, who worshipped him and gave him their unfaltering loyalty. It was probably for this reason more than any other that, at the beginning of 44 BC, he announced a new expedition to the east, to avenge the death of Crassus and to teach the Parthians a lesson. He would be commanding it in person, and would leave on 18 March.
For the Roman patricians, to be ruled by a dictator was bad enough; the prospect of being ordered about by his secretaries for the next two years or more was intolerable. And so the great conspiracy took shape. It was instigated and led by Gaius Cassius Longinus, who had supported Pompey until Pharsalus but whom Caesar had subsequently pardoned. With Cassius was his brother-in-law Marcus Brutus. Brutus had been a special protégé of Caesar, who had made him governor of Cisalpine Gaul, but he could never forget his putative descent from the early hero Junius Brutus, who had driven the Etruscan king Tarquin from Rome–in revenge for the rape and subsequent suicide of Lucretia Collatina–and was thus considered the architect of republican liberty. When in February 44 BCCaesar was nominated dictator in perpetuo, Brutus seems to have felt that it was time for another blow to be struck in the same cause. Together, he and Cassius collected some sixty fellow conspirators, and on 15 March they were ready.
On that day, just three days before Caesar was to leave for the east, he attended a meeting of the Senate in the large hall that adjoined the Theatre of Pompey. As he approached, a Greek who had formerly been a member of Brutus’s household slipped into his hand a note of warning, but Caesar, not troubling to read it, walked on. The conspirators had ensured that his principal lieutenant, Mark Antony–who was not only utterly loyal to his master but was also possessed of huge physical strength–should be detained in conversation by one of their number. They had also carefully stationed nearby a band of gladiators to be ready in the event of a free fight, but the precaution proved unnecessary. Publius Casca seems to have been the first to attack, his dagger striking the dictator in the throat; within moments Caesar was surrounded by the conspirators, all of them frenziedly stabbing, pushing their fellows aside the better to plunge their own blades into whatever part of his body they could reach. Their victim defended himself as best he could, but he had no chance. Covering his bleeding head with his toga, he fell against the plinth of Pompey’s statue.
Seeing him dead, those present were seized by a sudden panic; they fled from the building, leaving the body alone where it lay. It was some time before three slaves arrived with a litter and carried it back to his home–one of the arms, we are told, dragging along the ground. Later, when doctors examined it, they counted twenty-three wounds–only one of which, however, they believed to have been fatal.
Just six months before his death, on 13 September 45 BC, Julius Caesar had formally adopted his great-nephew, Gaius Octavius, as his son. Although still only nineteen, Octavian (as he is generally known in his pre-imperial years) had long been groomed for stardom. Already at the age of sixteen he had been appointed Pontifex Maximus; since then he had fought with distinction with Caesar in Spain. Thus, despite his youth, on the death of his great-uncle he might have expected to assume power; but Mark Antony, Caesar’s chief lieutenant, moved fast and–not hesitating to falsify certain of his dead master’s papers–seized control of the state. Octavian fought back, and thanks largely to the championing of Cicero–one of the greatest orators in all history, who loathed autocrats in general and Antony in particular and made a series of dazzling speeches against him–gradually won a majority in the Senate.
Rome was once again polarised and on the brink of civil war. There was even a small battle at Modena, which ended in a victory for Octavian. But by November 43 BC the two had effected an uneasy reconciliation and, with another of Caesar’s generals, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, formed an official five-year triumvirate entrusted with the task of setting the government back on its feet. Their first priority was to track down the two men chiefly responsible for Caesar’s murder. Brutus and Cassius had fled with their loyal soldiers across the Adriatic; leaving Lepidus in charge in Rome, Octavian and Antony pursued them to Philippi in Macedonia where, in two successive battles three weeks apart, the rebel army was defeated, its two leaders both falling on their swords. By mutual agreement, Lepidus was firmly relegated to a back seat. The victors now divided up the Roman world between them, Antony taking the eastern half, Octavian the west.
The little town of Tarsus in Cilicia is perhaps best known today for having been the birthplace of St Paul; some forty years before his birth, however, it was the scene of another event which had a still greater effect on the world as we know it. It was at Tarsus, some time in the summer of 41 BC, that Mark Antony first set eyes on Queen Cleopatra VII. Six years before, Julius Caesar had established her on the throne of Egypt, together with the man who was both her brother and her brother-in-law, Ptolemy XIV. Before long, according to the curious tradition of the Ptolemys, he also became her husband; even this triple relationship, however, failed to endear him to her and in 44 BC she had him murdered. She now reigned alone, but she needed another Roman protector and she had come to Tarsus knowing that it was there that she would find him.
Despite the testimony of Shakespeare–and Pascal’s famous remark that, if her nose had been a little shorter, the whole history of the world would have been changed–Cleopatra seems to have been attractive rather than classically beautiful. She nevertheless had little difficulty in ensnaring Mark Antony just as she had Caesar himself, even persuading him to arrange for the death of her sister Arsinoë, whom she had never forgiven for once having established a rival regime in Alexandria. (Arsinoë was the last of her five siblings to die a violent death, at least two of them having perished on Cleopatra’s personal initiative.) Antony was delighted to oblige, and as a reward was invited to Alexandria for the winter; the result was twins. After that the two did not see each other again for three years, but in 37 BC he invited her to join him in his eastern capital of Antioch and they formed a permanent liaison, another son being born the following year.
Theirs was an idyll; but, regularly punctuated as it was by Antony’s military campaigns, it could not last. In Rome his fellow triumvir Octavian–whose sister Octavia Antony had recently married–was outraged by his brother-in-law’s behaviour and grew more and more resentful of Cleopatra’s obvious power over him; in 32 BC, after Antony had formally divorced Octavia, her brother declared war on Egypt. On 2 September 31 BC the rival fleets met off Actium, just off the northern tip of the island of Leucas. Octavian scored a decisive victory, pursuing the defeated couple back to Alexandria; it was almost another year, however, before the final scene of the drama was enacted. Not until 1 August 30 BC did Octavian enter the city, where he gave orders that Egypt should in future be a province of Rome, remaining under his direct personal control. Cleopatra barricaded herself in her private mausoleum and gave it out that she had committed suicide; hearing the news, Antony in his turn fell on his sword, but immediately afterwards learned that the report was false. He was carried into her presence, and according to Plutarch the two had a last conversation together; then he died.
The manner of Cleopatra’s death is less certain. She certainly poisoned herself, but how? Plutarch tells the story of the asp much as Shakespeare wrote it, but adds that ‘the real truth nobody knows’. Nonetheless, the arguments for the snake-bite theory are strong. The Egyptian cobra–which represented Amon-Ra, the sun god–had been a royal symbol since the days of the earliest pharaohs, who wore its image as a diadem on their crowns; a more regal manner of death could scarcely have been imagined. More conclusive still, Suetonius tells us that Octavian later let it be known that the moment he heard of Cleopatra’s suicide he had summoned the snake-charmers and had ordered them to suck the poison from the wound. But if they came at all, they came too late.
Dost thou not see the baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?