Round and Round the Racetrack
What we describe as a greasy pole the Romans called the ‘Cursus’. This was a word with several shades of meaning. At its most basic level it could be used of any journey, particularly an urgent one. Among sporting circles, however, it had a more specific connotation: not only a racetrack, but the name given to the chariot races themselves, the most popular event held in the Circus Maximus, that great sounding board of public opinion. To call a nobleman a charioteer was an insult – little short of describing him as a gladiator or a bandit – yet there, embedded in the language of the racing fan, the comparison persisted, a hint of what was perhaps an unpalatable truth. In the Republic sport was political and politics was a sport. Just as the skilled charioteer had to round the metae, the turning posts, lap after lap, knowing that a single error – a clipping of a meta with his wheel-hub, or an attempt to round it too fast – might send his vehicle careering out of control, so the ambitious nobleman had to risk his reputation in election after election. To the cheers and boos of spectators, charioteer and nobleman alike would make their drive for glory, knowing that the risk of failure was precisely what gave value to success. Then, once it was over, the finishing line breasted, or the consulship won, new contestants would step forward and the race would start again.
‘The track which leads to fame is open to many.’11 Such was the consolatory maxim – but it was not strictly true. Because the track in the Circus was narrow, only four chariots could compete on it at a time. In elections, too, there was a similarly restricted field. Glory was not on infinite supply. Only a limited number of magistracies could be held each year. Sulla, by increasing the number of annual praetorships from six to eight, had attempted to broaden the opportunities on offer. But because he had simultaneously neutralised the tribunate and doubled the size of the Senate, his legacy was in fact one of increased competition. ‘The clash of wits, the fight for pre-eminence, the toiling day and night without break to reach the summit of wealth and power’12 – this was the spectacle that the Cursus provided. Over the succeeding decades it would become ever more gruelling, carnivorous and frantic.
As they had always done, established families dominated the competition. The pressure that afflicted Caesar, of belonging to a family with few consulships to its name, was no more burdensome than the pressure on a consul’s son. The greater the ancient triumphs of a house, the more horrific was the idea that these might end up squandered. To an outsider, it might appear as though all a nobleman had to do was stay in his bed, ‘and electoral honours would be given to him on a plate’13 – but nothing in Rome was ever given to anyone in that way. Nobility was perpetuated not by blood but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. Fail to gain a senior magistracy or – worse – lose membership of the Senate altogether and a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only ‘to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all’.14 No wonder, then, that the great houses so resented intruders into the Senate. The election of arrivistes to the quaestorship, first and most junior of the stages on the Cursus, they might just about tolerate, but access to the more senior magistracies – the praetorship and the consulship – was ferociously guarded. This made the task of an ambitious parvenu – a ‘new man’, as the Romans called him – all the more arduous. Yet it was never impossible. As old families crashed out of the race, so new ones might find themselves in pole position to overtake. The electorate was capricious. Sometimes, just sometimes, talent might be preferred to a celebrated name. After all, as new men occasionally dared to point out, if magistracies were hereditary, then what would be the point in holding elections at all?15
Marius, of course, provided the great example of a commoner made good. If it were sufficiently dashing, a military career might well provide a new man with both glory and loot. All the same, it was hard for anyone without contacts to win a command. Rome had no military academy. Staff officers were generally young aristocrats adept at pulling strings. Caesar would never have had the opportunity to win his civic crown had he not been a patrician. Even once it had been obtained, a military posting could bring its own problems. Lengthy campaigns, of the kind that might win a new man spectacular glory, would also keep him away from Rome. No one on the make could afford long-term leave of absence. Ambitious novices in the political game would generally serve their time with the legions, and maybe even win some honourable scars, but few made their names that way. That was usually left to established members of the nobility. Instead, for the new man, the likeliest career path to triumph in the Cursus, to the ultimate glory of the consulship and to seeing himself and his descendants join the ranks of the elite, was the law.
In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans no end to point out how ‘incredibly muddled – almost verging on the ridiculous – other legal systems are compared to our own!’16 In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squirrelling away his portable wealth in time. His political career, however, would be over. Not only were criminals stripped of their citizenship, but they could be killed with impunity if they ever set foot back in Italy. Every Roman who entered the Cursus had to be aware that this might be his fate. Only if he won a magistracy would he be immune from the prosecutions of his rivals, and even then only for the period of his office. The moment it ended his enemies could pounce. Bribery, intimidation, the shameless pulling of strings – anything would be attempted to avoid a prosecution. If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.
To the Romans, with their inveterate addiction to passionate and sensational rivalries, this made the law a thrilling spectator sport. Courts were open to the general public. Two permanent tribunals stood in the Forum, and other temporary platforms might be thrown up as circumstance required. As a result, the discerning enthusiast always had a wide choice of trials from which to choose. Orators could gauge their standing by their audience share. This only encouraged the histrionics that were anyway part and parcel of a Roman trial. Close attention to the minutiae of statutes was regarded as the pettifogging strategy of a second-class mind, since everyone knew that only ‘those who fail to make the grade as an orator resort to the study of the law’.17 Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke.18 Conversely, he felt not the slightest embarrassment at displays of wild emotion. Defendants would be told to wear mourning and look as haggard as they could. Relatives would periodically burst into tears. Marius, we are told, wept to such effect at the trial of one of his friends that the jurors and the presiding magistrate all joined in and promptly voted for the defendant to be freed.