The eastern provinces, led by the wily Mithridates, king of Pontus, twice rebelled, and it was many years before Rome regained full control.
However, the real threat to the Republic lay in domestic dissension at home. While Rome had no political parties in the modern sense and, apart from the occasional new man like Octavius, almost all elected officials were drawn from a small number of noble families, two distinct trends of opinion marked the political scene.
The optimates, the “best people,” represented conservative opinion, traditional values, and a collegiate approach to politics. They resented any challenge to the ruling oligarchy and, because they controlled the Senate, were able to block reform. The optimates’ opponents, the populares, claimed to stand, as their nickname suggests, for the interests of the Roman people, of the citizenry at large. Although some of the populares were genuine reformers, others were simply ambitious individualists.
In the eighties B.C., two outsize political personalities collided. One was a respected popularis, Gaius Marius, victor over the Celts. The second was an optimate, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In 88 B.C., despite the fact that it was illegal for armed soldiers to enter Rome, Sulla marched his army, loyal to him personally and to no one else, into the city to fight against Marius and his friends. Such an attack had never happened before in the history of the Republic. Sulla’s action set a black precedent for ambitious Romans to follow in later years, as violence among politicians became more common.
One after another, Marius and Sulla staged massacres of their political opponents. In Sulla’s case, the bloodletting was legalized. He was elected dictator and, using the supreme emergency powers this gave him, he posted in the Forum a list of his political enemies who were to be killed without trial. Sulla even offered rewards for their execution. Modern scholars estimate that about five hundred died, senators and a larger number of equites. This summary procedure was called a proscription.
Sulla introduced measures to strengthen the power of the Senate and weaken that of the people, and then retired into private life. When he died in 78 B.C., most of his reforms were quickly overturned.
Both of these bitter rivals won power but failed to make good use of it, and to its ruin, Rome grew ever more accustomed to the use of force to settle political disputes.
Julius Caesar never troubled to conceal the fact that he was a popularis both by conviction and by family tradition. As quaestor, aedile, and praetor, he had gone out of his way to infuriate respectable opinion. In 60 B.C., when Gaius was three years old, Caesar was in his fortieth year and planning his campaign to win the consulship for 59. He knew that his opponents in the Senate would do everything they could to stop him.
Caesar combined charm and determination in equal quantities. According to Suetonius, he was tall, fair, and well-built, with a rather broad face, keen, dark-brown eyes, and soft, white skin. He wore fashionable clothes. “His dress was, it seems, unusuaclass="underline" he had added wrist-length sleeves with fringes to his purple-striped senatorial tunic, and the belt which he wore over it was never tightly fastened.” He was very attentive to his appearance, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved (his growing baldness upset and irritated him), and depilating his body.
He was prone to headaches and suffered from epileptic seizures (which grew in frequency as he became older). Despite his luxurious tastes, he cultivated a healthy and energetic life. He kept to a simple diet and was an expert horseman from boyhood. He had trained himself to put his hands behind his back and then, keeping them tightly clasped, to put his horse to a full gallop; as the stirrup had not yet been invented, this was no mean feat. When on military campaigns he inured himself to long, hard journeys, sleeping night after night in the open.
Caesar spent much of his leisure time chasing after the wives of his political colleagues; it was widely rumored that he slept with men as well. He had extravagant tastes and once gave the favorite of his numerous mistresses—Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus—a pearl worth an astonishing 240,000 sesterces. He was a keen collector of gems, carvings, statues, and “old masters” (sculptures and paintings of the Greek artistic heyday in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.). He liked to have clever and attractive people around him, and paid such high prices for good-looking and talented slaves that he was too ashamed to have them recorded in his account books.
A politician still on the way up, Caesar knew he would not win the consulship without help. He took the momentous decision to form an alliance with two leading populares. One was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (in English, Pompey the Great), who was, by common consent, the greatest man of his age. As a young man he had raised a private army to support Sulla, and behaved cruelly enough to win the nickname adulescens carnifex, the “butcher boy.” He was a competent general but a manager of genius, who accomplished a series of special commissions with speed and efficiency—in particular, clearing the Mediterranean of pirates and finally putting paid to Mithridates. The second leading Roman in Caesar’s sights was Marcus Licinius Crassus; he had defeated Spartacus and was a multimillionaire property developer who once quipped that a man could only count himself rich if he could afford to pay an army. In 60 B.C., they joined forces with Caesar, who sealed the deal by marrying Julia, his daughter and only legitimate child, to Pompey.
Modern historians call the pact the First Triumvirate; at the time it was nicknamed “the three-headed monster,” because the three men made themselves the unofficial rulers of Rome. They pooled their financial resources and supporters to control the voting at assemblies. In this way they won consulships for one another and for their friends, and passed whatever laws they wished (including allocations of land for demobilized veterans) over the head of the Senate. They also gave themselves unusually long five-year governorships in the provinces (proconsuls traditionally served for only one to three years).
When Caesar was consul in 59 B.C., he ignored the vetoes of his optimate colleagues and pushed controversial legislation through the assembly. This was a breach of the constitution, and his enemies neither forgot nor forgave the high-handedness. However, officeholders were immune from prosecution and for the time being he could not be taken to court.
The Senate was furious but powerless. Sooner or later, it hoped, the trio would quarrel. Then the time would come when the optimates could take their revenge. The Senate’s leading personality at this time was Marcus Porcius Cato—a dour man. Plutarch reports: “It was really very difficult to make him laugh, although once in a while, he allowed himself to relax his features into a smile.” He refused to use perfume and his personal habits were severe. He always walked, and trained himself to endure extremes of heat and cold. He was a hard worker and prided himself on never telling a lie; his reputation inspired a proverb—“That cannot be true, even if Cato says it is.” His way of life was a reproach to the decadence of the times, so much so that he could infuriate his friends as well as his enemies.
Whereas Caesar appears to have been an abstemious drinker, Cato was puritanical in everything except for an enormous capacity for alcohol and a surprising weakness for gambling. He remarked that “Caesar was the only sober man who tried to wreck the constitution.”
After his consulship, Caesar went to rule Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul (northern Italy and southern France). Wanting to prove himself as a general, he invaded the rest of Gaul (central and northern France and Belgium). When he needed more time to complete the conquest, he arranged a second five-year term as governor. By 49 B.C., he had added a huge new province to the empire—and in so doing created an experienced army that would follow wherever he led.