Only with a career of short cuts behind him could a Roman have suffered a mid-life crisis of this nature. Most of Pompey’s countrymen yearned for their forties. Middle age was the prime of a citizen’s life, and for the upper classes a time when they could at last run for the consulship. To the Romans, the cult of youth appeared unsettling and foreign, a delusion to which kings in particular were prone. Greek potentates were forever attempting to hold back the years, whether by preserving their youth in images of marble or by raising pompous monuments to themselves. A Roman was expected to know better. After all, what was the lifeblood of the Republic if not the onward passage of time? Each year magistrate gave way to magistrate, and the man who relived his term of office excessively, as Cicero did, became a figure of ridicule. As water was used to dilute wine, so time was relied upon to dissipate the headiness of glory. The Romans, precisely because they had a deeper thirst for honour than any other people in the world, were the more alert to its perils. The sweeter it tasted, the greater the risk of intoxication. The limit of a magistracy was set at a year, but of a triumph at one or two days. The procession ended, the feast consumed, the trophies hung in the temples of the gods, all that was left behind was litter in the streets. For the Romans, the truest monuments to glory were fashioned not of marble but of memories. Spectacle, if it were not to be an insufferable affront to civic values, had to be fleeting, ephemeral, just like the authority of the magistrate who sponsored it. Forbidden great architecture, the Romans made an art form out of festival instead.
Never did their city appear more like the capital of an empire than when its shabbiness was transformed into a realm of fantasy. Whole theatres might be raised, adorned with marble columns, their floors made of glass or gilded floorboards, filled with bronze statues and dazzling trompe l’oeils – and yet the theatres themselves were merely sets. Thrown up to stage a festival, they would be torn down brutally the moment it had finished. Only once, back in 154, had the censors licensed the construction of a permanent theatre, but even as it was nearing completion, prominent at the base of the Palatine, opinion in the Senate had hardened against it and it had been dismantled, block by block. The result, still apparent nearly a century later, was a powerful incongruity: Rome, mistress of the world, lacked what even the most provincial towns in Italy possessed: a theatre built of stone.
To many citizens, this remained a source of pride, an emphatic demonstration of republican virtue and a guarantee of that ‘peculiar manliness which has always distinguished the Roman people’.1 To others, it was an embarrassment. Pompey, for instance, swaggering his way around the East, had resented being upstaged by the splendours of Greek architecture, regarding it as an affront to his own prestige and that of Rome. Having looted everything from wine-coolers to balsam trees for his triumph, he had rounded off his pilfering by having sketches drawn of the great theatre of Mitylene, planning to build a copy of it, ‘only larger and more magnificent’.2 Even as the debris from his triumph was being swept up, Pompey’s labourers were moving in on the Campus Martius. Flat, empty and close to the Forum, nothing more tempting to a developer could have been imagined – and Pompey had never been good at resisting temptation. The monumentalism of his plans was obvious from the start. He claimed, disingenuously, that he was building a temple to Venus and that the seats were designed as steps leading upwards to the shrine, but nobody was fooled. Once again, as had happened throughout Pompey’s career, precedent was being trampled with cavalier abandon. Not that Pompey himself was remotely bothered. The money being spent was his own, after all. What else should he spend his fortune on if not a gift to the Roman people?
Most of the Roman people, unsurprisingly, agreed. But while Pompey’s admirers thrilled to the gargantuan scale of their hero’s generosity, his peers in the Senate did not. There, particularly in its upper reaches, suspicion was deepening to the point of paranoia. It was noted that the foundations of the new theatre stretched almost to the Ovile. The completed complex would tower above the voting pens. Elections would be held literally in Pompey’s shadow. The Republic itself seemed in danger. This was the cry that had always united the aristocracy against over-reachers, and so it did again now. Catulus, long the leading critic of Pompey’s unconstitutional career, had died shortly after Clodius’ trial, perhaps driven into his grave by the result, but Cato remained unbending as the champion of tradition, and he was more than ready to take on Pompey. In association with the inveterately envious Crassus he constructed an unshiftable bloc of opposition to Pompey’s interests, reducing the great general, in the midst of all his glory, to a sudden, startled impotence. The Senate refused to ratify his settlement of the East. His veterans were denied the farms they had been promised. Even his victory over Mithridates was sneered at by Cato as ‘a war against women’.3
Pompey reacted with hurt and perplexity. Had he not conquered 324 different nations? Had he not doubled the size of Rome’s empire? Why did the Senate refuse to give him his due? Illegal in his methods he may have been, but in his aims he was the very model of convention. Far from aiming at a monarchy, as his enemies darkly hinted, Pompey longed for nothing more than to be accepted into the bosom of the establishment. He had his own insecurities. His family was not an ancient one. The prestige of a man such as Cato, whose achievements were a fraction of his own, gnawed at him, and inspired in him an envious respect. Even when his own reputation had been at its highest, on his return from the East in 62 BC, Pompey had demonstrated an almost puppyish desire to know that Cato respected him in turn. He had gone so far as to divorce his wife, despite the fact that she was the sister of his close ally, Metellus Celer, and announced that he and his son would marry Cato’s two nieces. Naturally, since he was now Rome’s most eligible bachelor, Pompey had assumed that Cato was bound to give his permission. So too had the prospective brides, but no sooner had the two girls excitedly started making their wedding plans than their uncle had told them to save their breath. Cries of joy had turned to tears. Not a woman in the household had failed to take their side. Cato, however, was hardly the man to be swayed by tantrums. ‘Pompey should know’, he pronounced dismissively, ‘that I will not be outflanked via the bedroom of a girl.’4 The embarrassed suitor was left looking sleazy and underhand, with nothing to show for the affair save the enmity of the insulted Metellus. Once again Cato’s unerring eye for the moral high ground had enabled him to seize the tactical heights as well. Pompey, floundering ever more badly in unfamiliar terrain, began to be worn down by his enemy’s constant sniping. By the spring of 60 he seemed almost to have given up the battle. The great man did nothing all day, Cicero confided to Atticus, except sit in wistful silence, ‘and gaze at the toga which he wore in his triumph’.5
Whatever the satisfaction that Cato took in such reports, however, he remained on his guard. Even amid the wreckage of his political fortunes Pompey remained a formidable foe. It was clear to everyone that if he wanted to break the logjam that Cato and Crassus had so skilfully constructed, then he would need an ally in the consulship, and not just any ally, but a heavyweight capable of facing down Cato. There was one obvious candidate for this role, but in the spring of 60 he was far away, in Spain.
Caesar, to most people’s surprise, had been making a great success of his spell as governor. The loose-belted dandy had proved a natural general. A dashing little war in what is now northern Portugal had not only enabled him to recoup many of his debts, but had led the Senate to award him a triumph. Even these successes, however, paled in comparison to the news of Pompey’s deepening predicament. Caesar could recognise the chance of a lifetime when he saw it. To seize it, however, he would have to hurry. Candidates for the consulship had to declare themselves in Rome by the start of July. Abandoning his province before his successor had even arrived, and travelling at his customary breakneck pace, Caesar made it to the Campus just in time. There, however, amid the clamour and dust of Pompey’s building work, he had to halt. Until he had celebrated his triumph he remained officially under arms, and therefore forbidden to enter Rome. Caesar installed himself in the Villa Publica, then hurriedly applied for the right to stand for the consulship by proxy – a request that the Senate, with a day to spare, appeared perfectly content to grant.