Ultimately effective and principled administration of the provinces depended on stable government in Rome. By 59 Caesar had marked himself out as a remarkable man, a supporter of the cause of the populares who was both consul and pontifex maximus. He saw the advantage of an agreement with Pompey that could harness the latter’s popular appeal to his own cause. Crassus had also to be brought in although he was bound to be an uneasy bedfellow. The agreement the three made was
Little more than an offer of mutual support in achieving their immediate aims. For Pompey this was, naturally, ratification of his settlement and land for his veterans, for Crassus favourable treatment for a group of his supporters who found they had bid too high for the privilege of collecting taxes in Asia. In return for using his consular power to achieve these ends Caesar expected support for a further overseas command at the end of his consulship.
Caesar was not to disappoint his allies. He introduced in the senate a land law to allow for the settlement of Pompey’s veterans. It was a moderate one. Some of the wealth Pompey had brought home from his conquests was to be used to purchase land from willing sellers. The senate, however, would do nothing to support Caesar and he was forced to turn to the people. With Pompey’s veterans crowding the Forum he pushed the land law through the concilium. Caesar then secured a law revising the terms for Crassus’ tax collectors and another ratifying Pompey’s settlement in the east. All the while Bibulus attempted to obstruct Caesar through what was in fact the perfectly legal device of scanning the skies and declaring the omens were unfavourable for business. Even the pontifex maximus could not counter such tactics and many of Caesar’s laws were technically invalid. He was open to prosecution by the optimates if at any time he lost the protective power of imperium that he enjoyed as consul or would enjoy as holder of a subsequent command.
Caesar, however, was in no mood to change course. In April 59 he embarked on a much more provocative land law, one that would distribute public land in Campania to some 20,000 citizens, mostly veterans and urban poor. In effect Pompey was having his own supporters settled not far from Rome. Fears of what Pompey and Caesar were up to were intensified when Pompey married Caesar’s only daughter Julia (a political alliance which, in the event, proved a genuine love match). Many now believed that Pompey and Caesar were after some form of dictatorship. Pompey, who was acutely sensitive to disapproval, found to his horror that his name was hissed in the theatre and his speeches in the senate greeted with silence. Caesar meanwhile had rewarded himself with a special five-year command in Gaul and Illyricum, one that would give him every opportunity to enhance his glory. (It was pushed through the concilium by a friendly tribune.) Pompey bullied the senate into adding governorship of the province of Transalpine Gaul to the command.
Among those who were apprehensive about the growing power of Pompey and Caesar was Cicero. In a speech in the courts as early as March 59 he dared to complain about the political situation. It was not clear what wider support he actually had but in the hopes of containing him Caesar and Pompey engineered the election as a tribune of a raffish aristocrat, Publius Clodius. Clodius loathed Cicero, who had testified against him when he had been on trial for sacrilege. Clodius could now have his revenge by using his office to attack Cicero over the execution of the Catilinian conspirators. Caesar offered to give Cicero protection (he had, in fact, some personal admiration for him) but Cicero was having none of it. However, he turned out to be particularly vulnerable. While reluctant to support Pompey and Caesar, it soon became clear that, as a novus homo, he had no real standing either among the optimates. Having used him as their figurehead during Catiline’s con-
Spiracy, they now had few inhibitions about discarding him. Cicero had been outmanoeuvred although in truth he lacked the steely temperament and ruthlessness now needed for political survival.
Once a tribune (for the year 58), Clodius quickly showed he was no mere creature of his patrons Caesar and Pompey. He had a clearly worked out programme specifically designed to win the support of the urban plebs. The two most popular measures were a law that allowed free corn handouts for the poor and another allowing the trade associations, the collegia, which had been banned in 64 after they had become centres for electoral bribery and intimidation, to operate freely once more. Exploiting his popularity, Clodius was also able to pass in the concilium a law exiling anyone who had condemned a citizen to death without trial. He could hold this over Cicero, who now found that neither Pompey nor Caesar felt obliged to support him. Without waiting for the prosecution that was now inevitable Cicero left Rome for exile in Macedonia. Once he had left, Clodius allowed his personal gang of roughs to ransack Cicero’s magnificent house near the Palatine.
In 58 Caesar left Rome to take up his commands. The potential for the glory of victory was immense. There had been continuing unrest among the tribes in Gaul and reports of a migration by one of them, the Helvetii, towards Roman territory. Memories of Hannibal and the Cimbri and Teutones had made Romans exceptionally sensitive to any threat of attack from the north and Caesar was able to exploit these sensitivities to the full. It was to be another nine years before he returned to Rome. The Helvetii were defeated in 58 and the remnants of the tribe forced back into what is now Switzerland. Caesar, with general support from the Gaulish tribes, now went north to take on a German tribe, the Suebi, who had spread across the Rhine into Gaul. By the end of 58 they had been pushed back across the Rhine. Caesar was now established in Gaul itself and made no pretence of staying within the provinces allotted him. The lure of further conquest and the plunder and political status that came with it was too strong. Some tribes, the Bel-gae in the north-west of Gaul, for instance, were provoked by the Roman intrusion and eager to resist. Others were embroiled in rivalries with neighbouring tribes that could be exploited. In his next year of campaigning, 57, Caesar brought virtually the whole of Gaul under Roman control. Back in Rome the news of his victories aroused such enthusiasm that even the senate recognized them, by the granting of fifteen days of public thanksgiving. (It had never given Pompey more than ten.)
In the senate the vote of thanks to Caesar was proposed by none other than Cicero. Cicero had returned from exile in September 57 thanks to the unremitting hard work of Pompey. As Clodius’ confidence had grown he had transferred his attentions to the humiliation of Pompey. The restoration of Cicero was one way Pompey could reassert his authority. The senate supported Cicero’s return and so, it turned out, did the mass of citizens outside Rome who had no particular reason to warm to Clodius and who favoured the recall of a man who stood for order. So Cicero was greeted with some popular enthusiasm on his arrival although it was clear that he was now in Pompey’s debt.
It was now Clodius who had been outmanoeuvred and he resorted to using gangs of his supporters, many of them runaway slaves, to intimidate his enemies. The atmosphere in Rome was vividly described by Cicero in a letter to his friend Atticus in November 57. Cicero was in the process of rebuilding his ransacked house, a move naturally opposed by Clodius.
On 3rd November an armed gang drove the workmen from my site. . . smashed up my brother’s house by throwing stones from my site, and then set it on fire. This was by Clodius’ orders. . . Clodius was running riot even before, but after this frenzy he thinks of nothing but massacring his enemies, and goes from street to street openly offering slaves their freedom.
A rival gang organized by one of the tribunes for 57, Milo, offered some resistance but the effect was simply to escalate the use of violence in a city where the senate had no effective means of keeping order. Unrest was fuelled by shortages of corn, the inevitable result of Clodius’ policy of handing it out free. The only man seen as able to resolve the situation was Pompey, and Cicero, in one of his first public appearances since returning from exile, steered the proposal that Pompey be granted the task of restoring corn supplies through the senate, despite widespread opposition from the optimates. However, attempts to give Pompey his own troops for his task failed, and his hopes that he would also be given a command to restore the exiled ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy Auletes, to his kingdom came to nothing. When Pompey failed to reduce the price of corn quickly he also began losing his support among the people.
This was all to Caesar’s advantage as it meant that Pompey would remain dependent on his support. It was probably for this reason that in April 56 Pompey agreed to go north to Luca, just inside Caesar’s province of Cisalpine Gaul, to meet with Caesar and Crassus to renew their understanding. The agreement made at Luca was that Crassus and Pompey would become the consuls for 55. This would enable them to secure commands to follow their year of office. In return they agreed to use their influence to secure a further command in Gaul for Caesar once his allotted five years were completed in 54. The Luca agreement shows how far the senate had lost the initiative and was at the mercy of those with the commands. For Plutarch, writing 150 years later, this was the moment when individuals became intent on destroying the government. Caesar even sent some of his men ‘on leave’ to Rome to allow Crassus and Pompey to bully their way into the agreed consulships. There was no pretence of holding an open election. In the other elections for the magistracies feelings ran so high that on one occasion Pompey returned home spattered with blood. Moderates such as Cicero were now completely impotent, simply there to be used by Pompey and Caesar as their mouthpieces. ‘What could be more degrading than our present life, especially mine,’ Cicero wrote in 55. ‘I am regarded as a madman if I say what I ought on public affairs, as a slave if I say what I have to, as a prisoner of war if I say nothing. . . I am as miserable as youd expect.’ With the senate and the moderates reduced to impotence the stage was set for the last act of republican history.
Cicero has already been introduced as an orator and as the consul who defeated the conspiracy of Catiline. He was also a man of learning and culture who thought deeply about the political system of Rome. In 55 bc he produced his first literary work, on oratory, and then in 54 began one of his most celebrated works, De Republica, a study of the republican state, which now survives only in fragments. It was written as a dialogue set in the 120s and is an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for an idealized past when the various components of the Roman political system, the democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical, existed in harmony.
By the time he was writing Cicero’s ideal world was no more. The republic was disintegrating around him and he was acutely sensitive not only to its destruction but to his own deteriorating political position. Much is known of his feelings as some 800 of his letters have survived. They provide an incomparable insight into the period. Cicero’s own personality, with its mixture of vanity and self-doubt, a love of peace and books (April 59 bc, ‘I have so fallen in love with leisure that I can’t be torn away from it. So either I enjoy myself with my books. . . or I sit counting the waves. . .’) that is set against a yearning for the approval of a public audience, captivates the reader. He is constantly commenting on events and his own, increasingly disillusioned, response to them.
The most frequent recipient of Cicero’s surviving letters is his old school friend Atti-cus, although many letters also survive to Cicero’s brother Quintus, and to Brutus, later to be one of the murderers of Caesar. Atticus (the name comes from Atticus’ long residence as a young man in Athens) was a wealthy and cultured man who avoided politics and concentrated on his academic interests and his friendships. When he later came to live in Rome he published Cicero’s works. Cicero could write to him without reserve, yearning for his company and his advice when the two were separated. In the tense months when civil war broke out in 49 bc (see below, p. 432), Cicero’s dependency on his friend becomes all the more acute. He writes in March 49:
I have nothing to write about, having had no news and having replied to all your letters yesterday. But since my distress of mind is such that it is not only impossible to sleep but torment to be awake, I have just started this scrawl without any subject in view, just in order as it were to talk to you, which is my only relief.
Cicero was as much concerned with his own position as with that of the state. He was a republican by temperament, a believer in the ancient liberties of Rome, but
Had to admit, even in De Republica, that the breakdown of order required a strong man to take control. (Cicero had Pompey in mind.) Yet strong men often act in a tyrannical way, and, in another of his letters to Atticus, Cicero agonizes over what is the proper course to take in these situations. Is it right to risk the future of the state by opposing a tyrant? Is it legitimate to put the safety of oneself and one’s family before one’s duty to oppose tyranny? What measures can a ruler use to keep order without becoming a tyrant? As Caesar emerged as dictator in the 40s these questions took on a new urgency (see below, pp. 436-8).
Cicero’s letters are also remarkable for their accounts of the everyday life of a cultured and leisured man determined to create harmony and good taste around him. Like many of the elite, he had a luxurious villa on the coast in Campania and here Greek culture could be displayed in a way that was still not fully acceptable in a Roman house. He even had two ‘Greek’ areas, one named after Aristotle’s Lyceum and one after Plato’s Academy. Getting the ambience right was important to him. He writes to his brother Quintus in 54 Bc about progress on a new villa Quintus was building:
At your Manilian place I found Diphilus [the architect] going slow even for Diphilus. Still he had finished everything except the baths, the cloister and the aviary. I liked the house enormously for the dignity of its paved colonnade, which I only realised when I saw the whole length open and the columns polished. It will all depend on the stucco harmonising and I will see to that. The pavement seemed to be getting well laid. I did not care for some of the ceilings, and ordered them to be changed. . . I admired the topiary work: the ivy has so mantled everything, both the foundation wall and the spaces in the colonnade, that now those Greek statues look as if they were the topiary artists pointing it out for our approval. Again the bathing-place is as cool and mossy as can be. . . (Translation: L. P. Wilkinson)
Perhaps inevitably, as political and family affairs took their course, Cicero became burdened with his personal disappointments. His marriage to Terentia had begun with passion but the letters to her that survive become less affectionate and more terse over time. He divorced her after many years of marriage when he found her meddling with his money (‘my household affairs are in as bad a state as the republic’). There are hints in his letters to Atticus that he found this upheaval deeply upsetting (‘at least my daughter [Tullia] and my brother still love me’). Terentia appears to have become jealous of his close affection for Tullia but even Tullia’s experiences brought him no happiness. He saw her married three times, the first time to a man of integrity who soon died, the third time to a rake. Then, in 45 BC she died in childbirth. It was a bitter blow, felt even more deeply because politics offered him no relief in that troubled period. His son Marcus also proved a disappointment, ending up with the reputation of the hardest drinker in town. Yet it is also clear from the letters that Cicero himself cannot have been easy to live with. He could be fussy, self-pitying, and ambivalent in his loyalties. At the same time he displays an undoubted, if rather lofty, humanity in his distaste for the slaughter of animals in the shows, in his affection for his freedman, Tiro, who takes down his dictated letters and arranges his books in a new home, and his concern over the deaths of those he loves. Cicero emerges as a fully human individual, one caught in a political
Turmoil over which he has no control and of which he eventually becomes a victim (see p. 439), as, tragically, were virtually every one of his sophisticated correspondents.
A complete contrast in tone comes from the poems of another of the ‘voices’ of the period, Gaius Valerius Catullus (C.84-C.54 Bc). Catullus came from a wealthy family in Verona but moved south to join in the literary circles of fashionable Rome. Like any ‘modern’ poet of the day he was steeped in Greek literature and among his surviving works are translations of Sappho and Callimachus. While drawing heavily on the metres and legends of Greece he was versatile enough to develop a voice which is entirely his own. In his own time he was best known for his erudite and finely crafted poems, such as the short epic ‘The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis’, which require an understanding of Greek myth to achieve their fullest impact. Here his initial inspiration appears to be the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (see earlier, p. 347) but it is not Jason and Medea he uses as unhappy lovers but Theseus, the hero prince of Athens, and Ariadne, whom Theseus abandons (by tradition on the island of Naxos). There is a powerful and emotive telling of their broken relationship and Ariadne’s eventual rescue by Dionysus (magnificently rendered in Titian’s masterpiece Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-3, now in the National Gallery, London), for which this poem was in itself an inspiration). (See Marilyn Skinner (ed.), A Companion to Catullus, Oxford and New York, 2007.)
The modern reader has, however, been attracted by Catullus’ record of his experiences in the ‘bohemian’ circles of late republican Rome. His poems detail the characters that surround him with all their eccentricities, pretensions, and betrayals. The most celebrated is Lesbia, the woman he loved and lost. ‘Lesbia’ is probably Clodia, the sister of the dissolute Publius Clodius. The affair is detailed from its first rapture to the despair of rejection.
You ask Lesbia, how many kissings of you are enough and to spare for me. As great the number of the sands of Libya to be found in silphium-bearing Cyrene between Jove’s torrid oracle and the sacred tomb of legendary Battus; or as many the stars which in the silence of the night behold the stealthy loves of mankind: so many kisses to kiss you would be enough and to spare for love-crazed Catullus, too many for the inquisitive to be able to count or bewitch with their evil tongues.
As he is betrayed he bitterly asks his friends to ‘take back to my sweetheart a brief and not kind message. Let her [Lesbia] live and be happy with her lovers, three hundred of whom at once she holds in her embraces, loving none truly but again and again crushing the balls of them all; and let her not count on my love as in the past, for through her fault it has fallen like a flower at the meadow’s edge, after being lopped by the passing plough.’ (Translations: adapted from T. P. Wiseman.)
This is the world of the sophisticated, the erudite, and the malicious. Catullus is adept at sending off obscenities to those he dislikes. (Even Caesar, who was rumoured to have had a homosexual relationship when young in the east, was the target of a lampoon.) There is also the genuine anguish of an age where personal
Relationships have become shallow and transient. These are the private voices of an age of uncertainty.
While Catullus is the poet of volatile relationships and torrid affairs, another poet of the age is known for his detachment from the turmoil of everyday life. This is Titus Lucretius Carus (98-C.55 Bc), author of De Rerum Natura, ‘On the Nature of Things, an exuberant portrayal of Epicureanism (see earlier, pp. 351-2). Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius. He was clearly a passionate admirer of Epicurus, and much of De Rerum Natura is devoted to praising the man who had freed the human race from superstition and religion and the fear of death. It has been justly said that this is a poem which is hostile to religion but which treats Epicurus with the adulation of a religious convert!
You, who first amidst such thick gloom could raise up so bright A lantern, bringing everything that’s good in life to light You I follow, Glory of the Greeks, and place my feet Within your very footsteps. . .
Lucretius sets out the atomic theory of Epicurus in what has been described as ‘one of the rarest of literary accomplishments, a successful didactic poem on a scientific subject’ (Alexander Dalzell). First, early in his poem, Lucretius derides religion and the power it has to distort moral responsibility. The example he gives is the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon so that he could be granted fair winds to take his fleet to Troy. (He develops this theme further in Book V, lines n6off.) Lucretius provides instead a non-theological explanation for the development of life, with grass and shrubs appearing first and then the first animals from wombs in the earth. He is still in Aristotle’s world of spontaneous generation.
Yet, mechanical though this world appears, even in the early brutish period of humanity’s development there is room for human affection and friendship, one of the cherished beliefs of Epicureanism. There is a continuous tension in De Rerum Natura between scientific explanation and an enthusiasm for the natural world that at time comes close to mysticism. Lucretius even goes so far as to hymn the goddess Venus as a creative force of fertility and sensuality. (It has to be remembered that Epicurus believed that the gods did exist but they had nothing to do with human life and could safely be disregarded.) The world is there to celebrate in joy.
And finally, when raindrops are cast down from Father Sky Into the lap of Mother Earth, they vanish from the eye,
But gleaming crops rise up, and trees put forth green leaves and shoots,
And the trees begin to grow, and weigh their branches down with fruits,
And so we in our turn are nourished, and so the wild brutes—
Hence we see happy cities all abloom with girls and boys,
And the trills of fledgling birds fill up the leafing woods with noise,
And herds and flocks, made sluggish with their fat, lay down their bulk In rich pastures, their heavy udders oozing with white milk,
And lambs go frolicking across young grass on wobbly legs. . .
(Book I, lines 250-61)
Lucretius follows the earlier ‘Atomists’ in describing a world that is purely material. Atoms are in continuous movement and always rearranging themselves and, for Lucretius, as with Epicurus, the body and soul are a coherent whole and the soul cannot exist without the living body. This is why one should have no fear of death and why ‘the superstitions and threats of [pagan, of course, in this context] priests’ must be resisted. The soul has no independent existence after death and cannot be punished in any hereafter.
Then Death is nothing to us; it concerns us not a jot,
Seeing we hold that the mind is mortal. And just as we did not,
In time gone by, feel anxious when the Carthaginian host Swarmed into the fray from every quarter, every coast;
And the whole world—everything between the sweeping shore Of heaven—trembled, shaken by the sickening shock of war,
. . . So when the bond is put asunder between body and soul,
The two from which we are composed into a single whole,
Nothing can befall us, we who shall no longer be.
(Book III, lines 830-40)
Later in Book V, Lucretius praises the power of the intellect in using reason to bring, among other fruits, civilization, seamanship, agriculture, law, poetry, painting, and sculpture:
And Reason lifts them up into the boundaries of light.
For men saw one thing after another clearly in their hearts Till they ascended to the very summit of the arts.
(Concluding lines of Book V, all translations:
A. E. Stallings from the Penguin Classics edition)
Lucretius was a loner in that his individuality lies wholly in the power of his work. He seems to have influenced no one in his own lifetime except a fellow poet, Virgil, who praises him in his Georgies, itself a paean to the fertility of the natural world. So Lucretius sank out of view, his materialism hardly in tune with medieval Christian Europe. Later, when a single copy of his work was discovered in a monastery in southern Germany in 1417, Lucretius became of interest again, but this was an age when even those most committed to Renaissance Humanism still saw themselves as Christian, and a hundred years later, his impact remained minimal. It was not until 1580 in the Essays of Montaigne that we find a meeting of intellects and then Lucretius was picked up by the seventeenth-century atomists and his influence became pervasive among scientists. (Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New York, 2011 or The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, London, 2011, is an exhilarating and elegantly written account of the discovery of the manuscript but comes nowhere near supporting its subtitles. Lucretius only became influential long after the Renaissance was past. ‘The Swerve’ refers to Epicurus’ theory that falling atoms can swerve and so collide with other atoms and form new material objects.)
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