Sulla stayed lucky to the very end.
FAME IS THE SPUR
A Patrician’s Progress
The life of a young Roman nobleman was filled with opportunity and risk. Civil war heightened the extremes of both. Under Sulla, a young man might be plunged straight into the deep end of adult life. Some profited spectacularly. Most dazzling of all was the example of Pompey, who continued to pose and preen perfectly unruffled by Sulla’s legislation against boy-wonders. Even as the dictator moved to forbid anyone under the age of thirty from holding political office, his fresh-faced lieutenant was thrashing an army of Marian die-hards in Africa, and being hailed by his troops as ‘The Great’. Pompey was exceptional, however, and gloried in the fact. Others of his generation were less fortunate. Sulla’s secret police respected neither youth nor pedigree. So it was, for instance, that because Marius had married into the Julians, the heir of that ancient, patrician family found himself on the run. Only nineteen, a young man whose family connections should have ensured him seamless advancement, he had to hide out in mountain haylofts and offer frantic bribes to bounty-hunters. It was an experience he would never forget. In future years he would prove himself unusually determined to master the vagaries of Fortune. No less than Pompey, the young Julius Caesar emerged from the years of Sulla’s domination hardened before his time.
In this both men were only proving themselves true to their upbringings. Hardness was a Roman ideal. The steel required to hunt out glory or endure disaster was the defining mark of a citizen. It was instilled in him from the moment of his birth. The primary response of Roman parents to their babies appears to have been less tenderness than shock that anything could be quite so soft and helpless. ‘An infant, like a sailor hurled ashore by savage waves, lies naked on the ground, unable to speak a word, utterly dependent on other people for his survival.’1 To the Romans, such a condition verged on the scandalous. Children were certainly too weak to be idealised, and the highest praise a child could be given was to be compared to an adult. The result is, to modern eyes at least, a curious and frustrating gap in ancient biographies. Never do the great figures of the Republic appear chillier or more remote from us than when their earliest years are being described. We are offered portraits of them as prodigies of physical toughness or learning – stiff, priggish, implausible. Anecdotes that portray them as children rather than as mini-adults are few and far between. The greater the figure, the less adequate the portrait of his childhood is likely to appear. The early years of a man such as Caesar are effectively a blank. Any attempt to recreate them must depend, even more than is usually the case in ancient history, on supposition and generalisation. Yet the attempt is still worthwhile. The Romans were as aware as any psychologist that ‘Nature displays her blueprints most clearly in a man’s earliest years.’2 Childhood was where the future citizen was made.
What, then, can we say with any certainty about the infant who would one day destroy the Republic? Gaius Julius Caesar was born on 13 July 100 BC, six years after Pompey, fifteen after Crassus. Ritual would have surrounded him from his earliest moments. A Roman did not become a citizen by right of birth. It was within the power of every father to reject a newborn child, to order unwanted sons, and especially daughters, to be exposed. Before the infant Caesar was breastfed, his father would first have had to hold him aloft, signalling that the boy had been accepted as his own, and was therefore a Roman. Nine days later he would have been named. Evil spirits would have been swept out of the house with a broom. The boy’s future would have been read in the behaviour of passing birds. A golden good-luck charm, the bulla, would have been placed around the baby Gaius’ neck, to stay there until he came of age and became a full citizen.
No delay would have been permitted in preparing for that moment. The Romans lacked a specific word for ‘baby’, reflecting their assumption that a child was never too young to be toughened up. Newborns were swaddled tightly to mould them into the form of adults, their features were kneaded and pummelled, and boys would have their foreskins yanked to make them stretch. Old-fashioned Republican morality and new-fangled Greek medicine united to prescribe a savage regime of dieting and cold baths. The result of this harsh upbringing was to contribute further to an already devastating infant mortality rate. It has been estimated that only two out of three children survived their first year, and that under 50 per cent went on to reach puberty. The deaths of children were constant factors of family life. Parents were encouraged to respond to such losses with flinty calm. The younger the child, the less emotion would be shown, so that it was a commonplace to argue that ‘if an infant dies in its cradle, then its death ought not even be mourned’.3Yet reserve did not necessarily spell indifference. There is plenty of evidence from tombstones, poetry and private correspondence to suggest the depth of love that Roman parents could feel. The rigours imposed on a child were not the result of wilful cruelty. Far from it: the sterner the parents, the more loving they were assumed to be.
Caesar’s upbringing was famously strict, and his mother, Aurelia, was accordingly remembered by subsequent generations of Romans as a model parent; so model, in fact, that it was said she had breastfed her children. This, notoriously, was something that upper-class women rarely chose to do, despite it being their civic duty, since, as everyone knew, milk was imbued with the character of the woman who supplied it. How could a slave’s milk ever compare with that of a freeborn Roman woman? Irresponsible aristocrats who handed their babies over to wet-nurses were clearly compromising their children’s future. Yet still they did it. It was a clear and shocking symptom of the degeneracy of the times. Aurelia’s boast that she had devoted herself to child-rearing had a proudly anachronistic ring.
And paragon of Republican motherhood that she was, no sooner had she weaned her children than she set about the business of their education. Gaius was not the exclusive focus of Aurelia’s attentions. As well as her son, she had two daughters, Julia Major and Julia Minor. The Romans believed that girls had to be moulded just as much as boys. Physical as well as intellectual exercises were prescribed for both. A boy trained his body for warfare, a girl for childbirth, but both were pushed to the point of exhaustion. To the Romans, self-knowledge came from appreciating the limits of one’s endurance. It was only by testing what these might be that a child could be prepared for adult life.
No wonder that Roman children appear to have had little time for play. Far fewer toys have been found dating from the Republic than from the period that followed its collapse, when the pressure to raise good citizens had begun to decline. Even so, children were children: ‘As they grow older, not even the threat of punishment can keep them from playing games with all the energy they have.’4 Girls certainly had their dolls, since it was the custom to dedicate these to Venus as part of the rituals of marriage. Boys, meanwhile, played obsessively with spinning tops. Dice appear to have been a universal mania. At wedding parties the groom would be expected to toss children coins or nuts that could then be played for as stakes. Caesar would one day talk of rolling a die when he faced the gravest crisis of his life, and his taste for the metaphor must surely have derived from his childhood. Even throwing dice, however, he would still have been supervised by the implacable Aurelia, who was as concerned to ‘regulate his behaviour when he was playing games as when he was hard at his studies’.5 Perhaps it was from his mother, then, that Caesar first learned to practise one of his greatest skills, the art of distinguishing an acceptable risk from a heedless gamble.