With Cicero safely gone, the great man was plunged into a renewed bout of brooding. Equivocations did not sit well with his self-image. He was still no nearer to squaring the impossible circle that had tormented him since his return from the East. He wanted the respect and admiration of his peers, and the supreme authority to which he believed his achievements entitled him – but he could not have both. Now, having made his choice, he found that power without love had a bitter taste. Spurned by Rome, Pompey turned for comfort instead to his wife. He had married Caesar’s daughter, Julia, for the chilliest of political motives, but it had not taken him long to grow helplessly smitten with his young bride. Julia, for her part, gave her husband the adoration without which he could not flourish. Surrendering to their mutual passion, the couple began to spend more and more time secluded in a love nest in the country. Pompey’s fellow citizens, unaccustomed as they were to displays of conjugal affection, sniggered in prurient disapproval. Here was true scandal. The public resentment of Pompey began to grow tinged with scorn.
No one was more sensitive to this changing wind of opinion than Clodius. He had a good nose for weakness, and began to wonder whether Pompey, for all the glamour of his reputation and his loyal veterans, might not perhaps be a man of straw – a hunch far too tempting not to be put immediately to the test. Aware that nothing would prove more vexatious to Pompey than a renewed assault on his settlement of the East – the issue which, after all, had forced him into the fateful alliance with Crassus and Caesar in the first place – Clodius went straight for the jugular. Prince Tigranes, the son of the King of Armenia, was still in Rome as a hostage, eight years after his father had handed him over to Pompey as a guarantee of good behaviour. Clodius not only abducted the Prince from under the great man’s nose, but then, to add injury to insult, put him on a boat bound for Armenia. When Pompey tried to seize back his hostage, his supporters were set upon and beaten up. The establishment, far from taking Pompey’s side, relished the spectacle of his impotent rage. This, of course, was precisely what Clodius had been banking on. Even as his gangs were rampaging through the streets, he found himself basking in the glow of the Senate’s approval.
Not that Clodius, given the opportunity to humiliate an enemy, had ever needed much encouragement. As with Cicero, so now with Pompey, he could smell blood. His gangs duly went into a feeding frenzy. Whenever the unhappy Pompey ventured into the Forum he would be greeted with a chorus of jeers. This was no idle matter. One of the most ancient laws of the Republic defined the chanting of abuse as akin to murder. By the light of such tradition Clodius was issuing death-threats, and Pompey was unnerved accordingly. He had never before been the object of such mockery. His passion for his wife provoked particular hilarity. ‘“What’s the name of the sex-mad general?”’ Clodius would yell. ‘“Who touches the side of his head with his finger?” … And after each question, he would make a signal to the mob by shaking out the folds of his toga, and his gangs, like a trained chorus, would scream out the answer in unison: “Pompey!”’23
‘Who touches the side of his head with his finger?’ For a man given to dressing up as a dancing-girl to accuse Rome’s greatest general of effeminacy took some nerve. This was all the more so because many of his most intimate circle were also embroiled in sex scandals. Mark Antony, moving on from his affair with Curio, had begun sniffing around Clodius’ much-loved wife, Fulvia, a breach of the codes of friendship that would soon see the two men threatening to kill each other. Similar trouble was also brewing over a woman to whom Clodius was even more passionately devoted. Following his triumphant prosecution of Hybrida, Marcus Caelius had celebrated by renting a luxury apartment from Clodius on the Palatine. There he had met Clodia. Witty, handsome and famous for his rhythm, Caelius had proved to be just the widow’s type. The ambitious Caelius had needed no encouragement to take up with a Claudian, and Clodia, with her husband barely cold, was evidently in the mood for consolation. Of course, her idiosyncratic style of mourning could not help but raise eyebrows. The affairs of the great lady remained a topic of abiding interest to Rome’s scandal-rakers, and a favourite theme of abusive sloganeering in the Forum. But no matter what was chanted against him and his sister, Clodius was always able to drown it out. Charges of immorality only provoked him to ever more furious denunciations of his own. The outrageous hypocrisy of it all only added to the fun. And so the abuse of Pompey and his lechery continued.
Of course, Clodius being Clodius, he could not resist seeing just how far the intimidation could be pushed. In August, as Pompey was crossing the Forum to attend a meeting of the Senate, a clattering of metal on stone rang out from the temple of Castor. One of Clodius’ slaves had pointedly dropped a dagger. Pompey, believing his life to be in danger, at once retreated from the Forum and barricaded himself behind his front door. Clodius’ gangs pursued him and set up camp outside. The tribune threatened to do to Pompey what he had already done to Cicero: seize his mansion, level it and build a temple to Liberty in its place. Pompey, unlike Cicero, did not bolt and run, but he found himself blockaded, unable to leave his house – a staggering reversal for the greatest man in the Republic. Again the Senate watched on in smug satisfaction. Crassus, with whom Clodius had been careful to remain on excellent terms, naturally shared in the general smirking. For Clodius himself, it was an intoxicating, scarcely believable moment of triumph. Champion of the aristocracy, patron of the slums, he appeared to be the master of Rome.
But only fleetingly. By testing the opportunities provided by street violence to the very limits, Clodius had blazed a trail that others were already preparing to follow. In December 58 Clodius’ term of office came to an end. Among the new tribunes was a gruff and brutal Pompeian, Titus Annius Milo. Encouraged by his patron, Milo formally indicted Clodius for employing violence, an open-and-shut case if ever there was one. Clodius, by appealing to his brother Appius, who was praetor that year, managed to have the charge suppressed, and ordered his gangs to ransack Milo’s house in revenge. But the new tribune, backed by the infinite resources of Pompey, and aware that he was dead meat unless he met violence with violence, refused to be intimidated. He began to recruit gangs of his own, not, as Clodius had done, by bribing amateurs from the slums, but by importing well-armed, well-trained heavies from Pompey’s estates and buying up gladiators to steel their ranks. At a stroke, Clodius’ monopoly on street violence ended, a challenge to which the former tribune rose with predictable gusto. The gang warfare escalated daily. Soon, it had become so brutal that all government institutions in the Forum, including the law courts, had to be suspended. Day after day, across the public places of Rome, the tides of anarchy ebbed and flowed.