The great achievement of Pompey’s proconsulship was to demonstrate that the concerns of business could truly be squared with the ideals of the senatorial elite. It established a blueprint for Roman rule that was to endure for centuries. It also, not coincidentally, raised Pompey himself to a pinnacle of glory and wealth. The client-rulers who swelled the train of Rome also swelled his own. In the autumn of 64 Pompey headed south from Antioch to bag a few more. His first target was the fractious kingdom of Judaea. Jerusalem was occupied. The Temple, despite desperate resistance, was stormed. Pompey, intrigued by reports of the Jews’ peculiar god, brushed aside the protests of the scandalised priests and passed into the Temple’s innermost sanctum. He was perplexed to find it empty. There can be little doubt as to whom Pompey thought was more honoured by this encounter, Jehovah or himself. Not wishing to aggravate the Jews any further, he left the Temple its treasures, and Judaea a regime headed by a tame high priest. Pompey then marched south, aiming to strike across the desert for Petra, but he was never to reach the rose-red city. Midway he was halted by dramatic news: Mithridates was dead. The old king had never given up on his defiance, but when even his son turned against him and blockaded him in his chambers, Rome’s arch-enemy had been cornered at last. After vainly attempting to poison himself he had finally been dispatched by one of the few things to which he had not cultivated an immunity, the sword point of a loyal guard. Back in Rome the news was greeted with ten days of public thanksgiving. Pompey himself, after announcing the news to his cheering legions, sped back to Pontus, where Mithridates’ body had been brought by his son. Not caring to inspect the corpse, Pompey contented himself with rifling through the dead king’s belongings. Among them he found a red cloak that had once belonged to Alexander. Looking ahead to his triumph, he promptly tried it on for size.
Few would have denied that it was his by right. His achievements stood comparison with any in the history of Rome. Yet as the great man prepared to head for home at last, the East finally pacified, his immense task done, there were few of his fellow citizens who did not find themselves unsettled by the prospect of his return. His wealth was beyond the dreams of avarice – even of Crassus himself. His glory was so dazzling as to blot out every rival. Could a Roman become the new Alexander while also remaining a citizen? In the last resort only Pompey himself could answer this question – but there were plenty, as they waited for him, prepared to fear the worst. Much had happened in Rome during Pompey’s five-year absence. Once again, the Republic had found itself in the grip of crisis. Only time would tell whether Pompey’s homecoming would help resolve it, or lead to a crisis greater still.
THE DEBT TO PLEASURE
Shadows in the Fishpond
While Pompey lorded it over the East the man he had replaced indulged himself with the most flamboyant sulk in history.
Lucullus had every reason to feel peeved. His enemies, not content with having had him dismissed from his command, continued to goad him on his return to Rome. Most vindictively of all, they blocked his triumph. In doing so they cheated him of the ultimate tribute that the Republic could pay to one of its own. Driven through the grateful streets, borne on the clamour of deafening applause and acclamation, a general on the day of his triumph became something more than a citizen, something more even than a man. Not only was he dressed in the gold and purple of a king, but his face was painted red like the holiest statue in Rome, that of Jupiter in the great temple on the Capitol. To partake of the divine was a glorious, intoxicating, perilous thing, and during the few brief hours when it was permitted a general became a spectacle of wonder and edification. To the Roman people who lined the streets to cheer him, he was living reassurance that ambition might indeed be sacred, that in struggling to reach the top, and to achieve great things, a citizen was fulfilling his duty to the Republic and to the gods.
Few could doubt that the victor of Tigranocerta merited such an honour. Even Pompey, stripping Lucullus of his legions, had left him a few thousand men for his triumphal procession. Yet in the Republic there was nothing so awe inspiring that it was not also touched by the sordid day-to-day. Those who had profited from intrigue – as Lucullus had done when he had first won his pro-consulship – might expect to suffer from it too. These were the rules by which every politician played. The sniping of enemies was proportionate to the stature of a man. The prospect of what Lucullus might achieve as a civilian filled his opponents with fear, just as it inspired his allies with high hopes. Behind the scenes assorted grandees did what they could to reverse the opposition of the tribunes, and see that Lucullus was granted his triumph, but however genuine their outrage, and however loud their cries of scandal, they had their own selfish reasons for campaigning on his behalf. No friendship in Rome was ever entirely devoid of political calculation.
But Catulus and his supporters, who had been relying upon Lucullus to take his place as a leader of their cause, were to be disappointed. With humiliation following upon humiliation, something inside Lucullus appeared to have snapped. The man who had spent six gruelling years in pursuit of Mithridates was by now drained of enthusiasm for combat. He abandoned the political battlefield to others, and surrendered himself instead, with all the ostentation he could muster, to pleasure.
In the East, as a triumphant assertion of the Republic’s greatness, Lucullus had ripped apart the palaces and pleasure-gardens of Tigranes until not a trace of them had remained. Now, returned to Italy, he set about surpassing all the wonders he had destroyed. On a ridge beyond the city walls he built a park on a scale never before witnessed in Rome, a riot of follies, fountains and exotic plants, many of them brought back from his sojourn in the East, including a souvenir from Pontus, most enduring of all his legacies to his homeland, the cherry tree. At Tusculum his summer villa was extended until it spread for miles. Most spectacularly of all, along the Bay of Naples, where Lucullus had no fewer than three villas, he built gilded terraces on piers, fantastical palaces shimmering above the sea. One of these same villas had belonged to Marius, the very estate to which the old general had refused to retire, dreaming of yet more campaigns, yet more triumphs. Lucullus, who had bought the villa for a record price from Sulla’s daughter, seemed determined to transform it and everything else he owned into monuments to the vanity of ambition. His extravagances were deliberately raised to be offensive to every ideal of the Republic. Once, he had lived by the virtues of his class. Now, retiring from public life, he trampled on them. It was as though, embittered by the loss of first power and then honour, Lucullus had turned his contempt upon the Republic itself.
In place of a triumph he instead flaunted his fabulous appetites. Sulla, to celebrate his victories, had feasted the whole of Rome, but Lucullus, with a greater expenditure of gold, positively revelled in private – and even solitary – excess. Once, when he dined alone and his steward provided him with a simple meal, he cried out in indignation, ‘But Lucullus is feasting Lucullus today!’1 The phrase was widely repeated, amid much shaking of heads, for nothing was more scandalous to the Romans than a reputation for enjoying haute cuisine. Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence. Back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook ‘had been the least valuable of slaves’, but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than ‘he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art’.2 In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial. The Senate, alarmed, had accordingly attempted to restrain it. As early as 169 the serving of dormice at dinner parties had been banned, and later Sulla himself, in a fine show of hypocrisy, had rushed through similar laws in favour of cheap, homely fare. All mere dams of sand. Faddishness swept all before it. Increasingly, millionaires were tempted to join their cooks in the kitchens, trying out their own recipes, sampling ever more outlandish dishes. This was the crest of the wave that Sergius Orata had ridden to such lucrative effect, but oysters did not lack for rivals in the culinary stakes. Scallops, fatted hares, the vulvas of sows, all came suddenly and wildly into vogue, and all for the same reason: for in the softness of a flesh that threatened rapid putrescence yet still retained its succulence, the Roman food snob took an ecstatic joy.