Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

In 60 BC Julius Caesar, who had been campaigning in Spain, also returned to Rome. He had been granted a triumph for his Iberian conquests, but in order to celebrate it he was obliged to remain outside the sacrosanct bounds of the city. However, he wished (as Pompey had done) to be elected consul for the following year, and in order to declare his candidacy he had to be in Rome. He asked the Senate’s permission to stand for office in absentia. Cato opposed him. A decision had to be reached before nightfall on a certain day. Once more Cato filibustered, haranguing his colleagues in his powerful, rasping voice until the sun went down. The next morning Caesar laid aside his command, thus giving up his triumph, and entered the city to seek election.

Rome’s three most powerful men had each found that, thanks to Cato’s intransigence, they were unable to impose their will on the Senate. They resolved instead to ignore it. In 60 BC Pompey, Caesar and Crassus arrived at a secret agreement (known as the First Triumvirate) that made them the effective, though unacknowledged, rulers of Rome, their combined wealth, manpower and political influence allowing them to bypass or overrule all the institutions of government.

Cato was outraged. Over the next four years, in the face of political intimidation that frequently escalated into violence, he unswervingly opposed the incremental growth of the power of Rome’s inordinately great men. Every time a rule was bent, a precedent ignored, an extraordinary privilege granted, he was there to oppose the innovation. Tireless and tiresome in equal measure, ‘always ready’, as Theodor Mommsen wrote, ‘to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not’, he let nothing pass. When Caesar became consul in 59 BC Cato obstructed and opposed his every move.

One of Caesar’s proposals was another bill granting land to Pompey’s soldiers. Pompey brought his veterans – the very men who would benefit from the measure – into the city, a tacit threat to anyone inclined to oppose its passage. A time limit was set for the Senate’s discussion. Few – nervously aware of the armed men thronging the streets around them – dared speak at all; but when it came to Cato’s turn he rose and, employing his favourite tactic, attempted to block the measure by speaking for hours on end. This time, though, he had an opponent with scant respect for senatorial procedure. Caesar’s gang of gladiators dragged him from the rostrum and hauled him off to the very prison cells where Catiline’s co-conspirators had been done to death. As Cato was hustled away, he continued to harangue the senators. Several followed him ‘with downcast looks’. Caesar called them back, demanding they finish the business in hand. One bravely replied: ‘I prefer to be with Cato in prison rather than here with you.’ Cato was marched across the Forum, still talking at the top of his powerful voice to the shocked and fearful crowd. He was released almost immediately, but his imprisonment was a crucial turning point in the history of the Republic, the moment when Caesar demonstrated that he would have his way, with or without the law.

There were more ugly scenes. When his ineffectual fellow-consul Bibulus (Cato’s son-in-law and ally) attempted to speak against him, Caesar had him and Cato thrown down the steps of the Temple of Castor. They were pelted with dung and Bibulus’ fasces, the emblems of his authority, were broken and thrown after him. There was little Cato could do in the face of such intimidation. Pompey, who had wished to be Cato’s son-in-law, became Caesar’s instead, marrying the consul’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years his junior. Caesar proposed a second land law. It was passed, for all Cato’s protests, the people seeming as entranced by Caesar’s glamour as the Athenians had been by Alcibiades’ (or perhaps they were just afraid of his enforcers). So was the one granting Caesar Gaul and Illyria for his provinces once his consulate lapsed, not for the usual one-year term, but for five years. A few years later Horace was to advise a poet wishing to represent Achilles, ‘Let him deny that the law was made for him.’ Caesar, bending every rule, ignoring every precedent, was acting with an Achillean disdain for legality. As the people gathered in the Forum to vote Cato addressed them with desperate vehemence, warning ‘that they themselves were establishing a tyrant in their citadel’. They voted the measure through regardless.

Caesar boasted at the end of his consulate that he had got everything he wanted to the accompaniment of his opponents’ groans: now he was free to dance on their heads. He departed for Gaul, having first contrived the election as tribune for the following year of his protégé Clodius, the man who was to plunge Rome into a state of such anarchy that, in Cicero’s words, ‘the blood that streamed from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges’. Clodius, whose personal name was Pulcher, ‘Beautiful’, dominated the circle of young aristocrats against whom Sallust railed for their ‘lewdness’ and ‘luxury’, their total lack of reverence for gods or man-made institutions. A blasphemer and sexual transgressor like Alcibiades, Clodius had – famously – disguised himself and gained entry to the secret festival of the Bona Dea, a women’s rite from which men were rigorously excluded. He was a womanizer whose lovers were said to include his own sister, Clodia, and Caesar’s wife. He was also, as the events of the next six years were to show, a brilliant political organizer, a charismatic demagogue and a man of dangerously unpredictable allegiance capable of turning savagely on magnates who had complacently imagined themselves to be manipulating him.

Immediately he took office he legalized the previously outlawed collegia, institutions that were part trade unions, part neighbourhood self-defence groups and part political clubs, and set about transforming them into units of street-fighting men. Owing their new legitimacy to him, the collegia became Clodius’ own instruments, making him, whether in or out of office, the warlord of the streets. First, though, he had to rid himself of those few public figures with the nerve and integrity to oppose him. He had Cicero sent into exile on the pretext that the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators had been illegal. Cato (without whom those executions would not have taken place) was treated less rudely. He was given the task of annexing Cyprus.

It was a prestigious and potentially lucrative assignment, but Cato saw it only as a means of getting rid of him. It was one of the fundamental differences between the constitutionalists like Cato and the Populares that the former clung to the anachronistic sense that nowhere outside Rome mattered. When Cicero was appointed governor of Cilicia (southern Turkey) he was to tell his friend Atticus that the task was ‘a colossal bore’. To others it might seem he was seeing the world. But he was pining for ‘the world, the Forum’, which to him seemed to be one and the same. Likewise, to Cato, that cramped and teeming rectangular space at the centre of Rome was the hub of the universe, the only place where words and actions had consequences. He accepted overseas postings grudgingly, and despatched them without enthusiasm. When his term of office as praetor ended he actually turned down the provincial governorship to which he was entitled. Pompey and Caesar, by contrast, made the provinces – the armies they were entitled to levy in order to subdue them and the fortunes they amassed there – the foundations of their power.

Cato’s role in Cyprus turned out to be one to which he was exactly suited, that of inventory clerk. The island’s ruler was a Ptolemy, brother of the King of Egypt, who was to be ousted ostensibly because he had supported the pirates against Pompey, but also so that his personal wealth and the revenue from his prosperous island could be added to the magnificence of Rome. Cato was not required to act the conqueror. On receiving his letter calling upon him to abdicate, Ptolemy poisoned himself. All Cato had to do was to take possession of his realm and convert his treasure into currency. This he did virtually single-handed, to the annoyance of his followers. Refusing to delegate any responsibility, he personally negotiated with merchants and private buyers, ensuring he got the highest possible price for all the jewels and golden cups and purple robes and other ‘furnishing of the princely sort’ poor Ptolemy had left. ‘For this reason’, reports Plutarch, ‘he gave offence to most of his friends, who thought that he distrusted them.’ The task was immense: the sum he brought back from Cyprus was so great that, when it was carried through Rome to the treasury, the crowds stood amazed at the quantity of it; but Cato insisted on making himself personally responsible for every detail of its collection and transport. He decided how the money was to be shipped and designed special coffers for the purpose, each one trailing a long rope with a cork float attached so they could be retrieved in the case of shipwreck. He had the accounts written out in duplicate. He had called the assignment an insult, but the people of Rome had voted that he must do it, so – punctilious and dutiful as ever – do it he did, with the driven thoroughness he brought to all his appointed tasks.

While he did so, the Roman Republic staggered under Clodius’ assault. ‘District by district,’ records Cicero, ‘men were being conscripted and enrolled into units and were being incited to violence, to blows, to murder, to looting.’ The collegia’s fighting bands were swelled by slaves. Gangs of swordsmen controlled the city’s public spaces. The Temple of Castor, the building whose high podium dominated the Forum and where Cato had twice suffered violence at Caesar’s hands, was converted from a place of worship and public assembly into a fortress. Clodius had its steps demolished, rendering access to it hard and its defence easy, and made it his arsenal and military headquarters. The political meetings, trials and plebiscites for which the Forum was the venue – all the public business of the state – now took place under the intimidating gaze of Clodius’ enforcers. Meetings of the Senate were interrupted by yelling crowds. A debate on Cicero’s possible recall from exile was broken up by rioters throwing stones and wielding clubs and swords. Some of the tribunes were injured (shockingly, since they were supposed to be inviolate) and several other people killed. When one of Clodius’ associates was put on trial a mob of his supporters invaded the court, overturning benches, dragging the judge from his place, knocking over the urns that served as ballot boxes and driving the prosecutors and jury in terror from the place. No one was exempt. Clodius had appeared originally to be the Triumvirs’ tool but now he turned viciously on one of them. When Pompey attempted to speak in the Forum, Clodius led a mob in heckling him cruelly. A fight broke out between Pompey’s and Clodius’ men: several people were killed and a man was caught apparently in the act of attempting to assassinate Pompey himself. Baffled and afraid, Pompey withdrew to his villa, where he lived virtually besieged.

By the time Cato returned from Cyprus in 56 BC with his haul of scrupulously catalogued treasure some kind of balance of power had been established, but at great cost to the cause of the constitutionalists and to the stability of the state. One of the new year’s tribunes, Milo, with Pompey’s encouragement and sponsorship, had assembled his own private army of slaves and hired thugs and emerged as a rival to Clodius. For weeks, the two gangs fought for control of the city. ‘The Tiber was full of citizens’ corpses,’ wrote Cicero, ‘the public sewers were choked with them.’ Clodius was at least temporarily contained. Pompey, recovering his nerve, reasserted himself and saw to it that Cicero was recalled amid scenes of public rejoicing all over Italy. Bread was scarce: the people were rioting for food. Cicero, returning a favour, advocated a measure granting Pompey control of the corn supply for the next five years, a commission that gave him ill-defined but enormous power both domestically and (since most of Rome’s corn was imported) throughout the Mediterranean.

Endemic violence, a near total collapse of the rule of law, disastrous food shortages, the acceptance even by a moderate like Cicero that only an armed potentate could save the disordered state – the situation to which Cato returned was the fulfilment of his direst predictions. At once he resumed his old task – that of preventing the great men becoming greater.

Caesar, Pompey and Crassus renewed their pact. Pompey and Crassus were standing together for election as the next year’s consuls. The constitutionalists in the Senate went into mourning, as though for the death of the Republic, but no one dared stand in opposition to the two magnates until Cato (who was not yet old enough to be eligible himself) persuaded his brother-in-law, Domitius Ahenobarbus, to do so and to declare that, if elected, he would terminate Caesar’s unprecedentedly long command in Gaul. Before dawn on the morning of the election Cato and Domitius went together to the Field of Mars, where voting was to take place. They were set upon in the darkness. Their torchbearer was killed. Cato was wounded in the arm. With furious resolution he tried to persuade Domitius to stand his ground ‘and not to abandon, while they had breath, the struggle in the behalf of liberty which they were waging against the tyrants, who showed plainly how they would use the consular power by making their way to it through such crimes’. His eloquence was futile. Ahenobarbus, less principled, or perhaps just more realistic, abandoned his candidature and took to his heels.

Cato, determined that the Triumvirs should not be unopposed, stood for election as praetor. Pompey and Crassus put up a candidate of their own and set about bribing the electorate in a vote-buying exercise of unprecedented scale and blatancy. On the day of the election Pompey had the Field of Mars surrounded by Milo’s thugs. Those who voted the wrong way could expect to suffer for it. Even so, so great was Cato’s prestige, the first votes declared were for him. Bribery and intimidation having both failed, Pompey invoked the gods. He declared he had heard thunder (though no one else had) and, thunder being a sign of divine displeasure, he cancelled the ballot. His supporters went to work on the voters again (whether with their money or their swords is not recorded). By the time a second vote could be held those who had initially voted for Cato had changed their minds.

Measure by measure the Triumvirs consolidated their power. Pompey and Crassus saw to it that they were assigned, as their proconsular commands, Spain and Syria respectively; they introduced bills allowing them to wage war as and when they saw fit and to levy as many troops as they wished. Pompey, further, had it agreed that he could delegate the government of Spain to his officials while remaining himself near Rome. Each time the people voted in their favour while all but one of the senators, listless in their impotence, allowed the legislation to pass without questioning or comment. The exception, of course, was Cato.

A man whose greatest skill was that of making a nuisance of himself, he let none of these measures pass without a hurly-burly. Time and again Cato forced his way onto the rostrum to harangue the people. Time and again he was manhandled down. He was briefly imprisoned again. Nothing could silence him. Denied the rostrum, he would mount his supporters’ shoulders instead. There was rioting. People were killed. But Pompey and Crassus, unperturbed, proceeded to their most controversial move. They proposed that Caesar’s command in Gaul should be extended for a further five years. This called from Cato a speech of the utmost passion and solemnity. He told Pompey that he had taken Caesar upon his own shoulders ‘and that when he began to feel the burden and to be overcome by it he would neither have the power to put it away nor the strength to bear it longer, and would therefore precipitate himself, burden and all, upon the city’. The prophecy, with its strange and awful image of the two giants, one weighing down upon the other, crushing the state beneath them as they toppled, was remembered by the historians, but in the short term it was as futile as all of Cato’s efforts. Caesar got his extended command.

Cato kept up his attack. He argued in the Senate that Caesar’s aggression against the German and Gallic tribes was not only wicked but illegal: the Senate, which supposedly determined Rome’s foreign policy, had not authorized it. The Gallic war, on which Caesar’s enormous (and still extant) fame was based, constituted a monstrous atrocity, a genocidal war crime carried out in full view of all the world over a period of nearly a decade. Caesar had taken the leaders of two German tribes prisoner when they came to him under terms of truce and then massacred some four hundred thousand of their people. This, fulminated Cato, was an outrage for which the gods would exact retribution. Caesar should be put in chains and handed over to the enemy for just punishment. Until his guilt was expiated, all Rome would be accursed. Legally speaking, Cato was correct; but the people of Rome preferred conquests, however achieved, to a clear conscience. Caesar fought on.

Over the next two years, Cato struggled ever more desperately for the cause of legitimacy. It was like building card houses in a hurricane. In Gaul Caesar, conquering tribe after tribe and carting their treasure away with him, grew ever richer and more powerful. At the end of each campaigning season he returned to the Italian peninsula, bringing some of his legions with him, and established himself in winter quarters near Ravenna, within his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he received visitors from Rome, clients and suitors to whom he dispensed largesse, agents who watched over his interest in the metropolis, candidates begging him to use his power to help them to office. Officially absent, he was nonetheless a drastically destabilizing off-stage presence in the drama of Rome’s politics.

While Caesar’s power grew insidiously, Pompey’s was paraded with superb ostentation. For five years he had been building a theatre of unprecedented size and grandeur on the Field of Mars. In 55 BC he inaugurated it with a series of spectacular shows. There were plays, extravagantly staged. (‘What pleasure is there in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules?’ wrote Cicero, who found the display vulgar.) There was a bloody series of games in which five hundred lions and untold numbers of gladiators were killed. There was an elephant fight (‘a most horrifying spectacle’, says Plutarch), which astonished the crowd. At the end of his consulate Pompey, invested now with the authority and the legal immunity of a pro-consul but declining to leave Rome, withdrew to his villa near the city. There he bided his time while the Republic tore itself to pieces.

Milo’s and Clodius’ gangs (the former apparently sponsored by Pompey, the latter by Caesar, but both in fact running way out of any sponsors’ control) bullied the citizens and battled each other for control of the streets. Meetings of the Senate were cut short for fear of violent interruptions by the mobs that gathered outside the chamber. Gangs of armed slaves burst into the Arena and put a stop to the sacred games. Elections took place, if at all, in an atmosphere of terror. It was apparent that the situation was untenable. ‘The city’, wrote Suetonius, ‘began to roll and heave like the sea before a storm.’

Yet Cato persisted. Mommsen called him a ‘pedantically stiff and half witless cloud-walker’, and certainly, viewed with hindsight, his dogged efforts to reform a political system on the eve of its extinction look absurd. But Cato, and most of his contemporaries, still assumed that the Republic would last for generations to come. To like-minded Romans his resolute campaign to restore it to rectitude looked not stupid, but saintly. Cato ‘stood alone against the vices of a degenerate state’, wrote Seneca. ‘He stayed the fall of the Republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do.’

His stand did not make him popular. Repeatedly, when he spoke in the Forum, he was jeered by hostile agitators. ‘He fared’, says Plutarch, ‘as fruits do which make their appearance out of season. For as we look upon these with delight and admiration, but do not use them, so the old-fashioned character of Cato … among lives that were corrupted and customs that were debased, enjoyed great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men.’ He was elected praetor on the second attempt and brought in a law banning bribery and requiring all candidates for office to submit full accounts of their election expenses. That year’s candidates acquiesced on condition that Cato himself (the only man who could be trusted with the job) would act as their umpire; but the electors, accustomed to being paid for their votes, were outraged by the notion that they should give them free. A riot broke out. Cato was set upon by an angry mob. He was knocked down and would have been lynched had he not succeeded in hauling himself upright for long enough to harangue the crowd into docility. As soon as he was eligible he stood for consul but, for all his prestige, was roundly defeated. When Alcibiades returned to his native city (as Pompey had done and Caesar was shortly to do) in the golden nimbus of victory, the citizens had begged him to make himself their absolute ruler, while only a handful of dissenters wished him on his way. So Cato was one of very few of his contemporaries unsusceptible to the glamour of the conquering generals who rode triumphant into Rome, apparently as superhuman in their swaggering magnificence as Plato’s men of gold. Compared with their splendour, Cato’s virtue seemed a dull and unappealing thing. While he clung to republicanism, Lucan was to write, ‘all Rome clamoured to be enslaved’.

In January 52 BC the first of the storms that had been so long gathering broke. The two urban warlords, Clodius and Milo, met – apparently by chance – some miles from Rome on the Appian Way. Clodius was attended by thirty slaves carrying swords, Milo by three hundred armed men, including several gladiators. A brawl began. Clodius was injured. He was carried into a tavern. Milo’s men broke in and killed him. As soon as the news reached Rome the city exploded into violence. Clodius the beautiful, Clodius the insolent, was gone, and the common people of Rome, to whom he had granted an intoxicating taste of their own power, ran wild. His associates, including two tribunes, displayed his corpse, naked and battered as it was, in the Forum. There were hysterical scenes of rage and grief. Prompted by the tribunes, the mob took over the Senate House, built a pyre of all the furniture and the senatorial records, hoisted Clodius’ corpse on top and set fire to the building. The seat of government, the repository of centuries of tradition, the brain controlling all the vast body of the Roman world, was reduced to charred ruins. The rioting spread as fast as the flames.

For a month the chaos continued. A hostile mob attacked Milo’s house, to be driven back by the archers of his personal guard. ‘Every day’, according to Plutarch, ‘the Forum was occupied by three armies, and the evil had well-nigh become past checking.’ The Senate declared a state of emergency, but the previous year’s consular elections had not yet taken place. There was no one to take control. ‘The city was left with no government at all like a ship adrift with no one to steer her.’ A mob invaded the sacred grove where the fasces were kept and seized them. Then, as though craving someone who could save them from their own licence, they swept on to Pompey’s villa outside the city and clamoured for him to make himself dictator. Pompey demurred. He was waiting for the more official invitation that he sensed could not be much longer withheld.

It came soon enough. Twelve years previously Cato had declared that ‘while he lived’ he would never consent to Pompey’s entering the city at the head of an army. Now, hopeless, he concluded that ‘any government was better than no government at all’. To the astonishment of his peers, he spoke in favour of a motion offering Pompey the post of sole consul.

Diplomatic and subtle as ever, Pompey invited Cato to work alongside him. Cato, his living opposite, stubbornly refused. He would be of no man’s party. He would give his advice when asked for it, he said, but he would also give his candid opinion whether asked for it or not.