Or so everyone assumed.
THE WINGS Of ICARUS
Crassus Loses his Head
As the triumvirate splintered, others, lower down the food chain, were engaged in desperate struggles of their own. At the beginning of April, Marcus Caelius was brought to trial. His colourful past did not bear close scrutiny. Certainly, the prosecution had no problem in alleging a vast range of vices and crimes, including – most shockingly of all – an assault on a deputation of ambassadors and the murder of its leader. What gave the trial its whiff of scandal, however, was a further charge: that Caelius had attempted to poison his lover, Clodia Metelli. Clearly the relationship had not been going well.
Not that the prosecutors ever even alluded to it. Because the details of the affair promised to be as damaging to Caelius as to Clodia, they had calculated that the defence team would be equally as discreet. But they had reckoned without Cicero. Relations with his old pupil had long been rocky, but the opportunity to launch a full-frontal assault on Clodia had been too good to miss. Rather than draw a veil over the affair, Cicero instead chose to make it the focus of his entire defence. ‘Suppose a woman who has lost her husband throws her house open to every man who needs sexual release, and publicly lives the life of a prostitute, suppose she thinks nothing of going to parties given by total strangers, suppose she carries on like this in Rome, in her pleasure-gardens, and among the orgy-set at Baiae,’ he thundered, ‘then do you really think it would be scandalous and disgraceful for a young man such as Caelius to have picked her up?’1 Of course not! After all, she was only a streetwalker, and therefore fair game! The jurors, listening to Rome’s queen of chic being eviscerated in this manner, were titillated and appalled. What they failed to notice was that Cicero, by going after his enemy’s sister, had obscured all the really serious charges against his client beneath a froth of innuendo. The strategy proved to be gratifyingly successfuclass="underline" Caelius was acquitted. Cicero could purr with satisfaction at a hatchet-job well done.
So dazzling had the performance been that it quite put in the shade a speech delivered at the trial by Caelius’ other guardian. Not that this would have concerned Crassus. He had never been one for pyrotechnics. He had no need of them. His purpose in coming to Caelius’ rescue had been to protect his investment in the young man’s future; a goal duly achieved, and at minimal political cost to himself. True, he had been privy to the demolition of Clodia, but even Clodius, rarely reticent in defence of his family’s honour, knew better than to lash out at Crassus. Subtle and understated in his methods he may have been, a man of whispered hints and promises rather than open threats, yet he remained the most menacing figure in Rome. Now at last, in the spring of 56, Crassus was preparing to test just how far that menace would carry him. Even as he spoke at Caelius’ trial his mind was elsewhere. A political masterstroke was being prepared.
The previous month Crassus had travelled to Ravenna, a town just beyond the frontier of Roman Italy, inside Caesar’s province of Gaul. Two other power-brokers had been waiting there for him. One had been Caesar himself, the other Clodius’ haughty eldest brother, Appius Claudius. Following a secret conference between the three men Crassus had returned to Rome, while Appius, staying with Caesar, had headed west. In mid-April the two conspirators arrived in the frontier town of Lucca. So too, heading north from Rome, did Pompey. A second conference was held. Again, its precise terms remained mysterious, but news of the meeting itself had spread so quickly that Pompey, arriving for it, had been accompanied by two hundred senators. More than a hundred bundles of fasces could be seen propped up in the Luccan streets. Senators on the make, their nostrils filled with the scent of power, scrabbled for advancement. To their more principled colleagues back in Rome, the clamouring of these aristocratic petitioners delivered an ominous message. Once again, authority appeared to be draining away from the Senate. Perhaps the triumvirate was not dead, after all?
And yet it seemed barely credible that Pompey and Crassus could have patched up an alliance a second time. What compact could they possibly have reached? And what of Caesar’s role in the murky business? What was he after now? One of the first to find out was Cicero. Chastened by his experience of exile, he no longer had any illusions that he could hold out against the combined might of the triumvirate. Against Clodius and Clodia, yes, but not against those who were infinitely his superior ‘in resources, armed force, and naked power’.2 When Pompey leaned on him he crumpled. Vulnerable and nervy, eloquent and respected, Cicero made a perfect tool. He was put to work straight away. That summer he had to stand up in the Senate House and propose that the provinces of Gaul, which Domitius Ahenobarbus had been eyeing so hopefully, remain Caesar’s, and his alone. Domitius, taken aback by this volte-face, exploded with fury. What was Cicero up to? Why was he arguing for something that he had once condemned as outrageous? Had he no shame? In private such questions left Cicero sick with misery. He knew that he was being exploited, and hated himself for it. In public, however, he paraded the ingenious argument that by changing sides he was in fact displaying statesmanship. ‘Standing rigid and unchanging has never been considered a great virtue in the Republic,’ he pointed out. Far from trimming, he was merely ‘moving with the times’.3
No one was much convinced – Cicero himself least of all. Maudlin with self-contempt, he tried to cheer himself up by indulging in the one constant he had been left, his blood-feud with Clodius. High on the Capitol, the bronze tablet celebrating his exile was still on public display. Accompanied by Milo, Cicero took it down, removed it and hid it in his house.* Clodius not only had the nerve to denounce him for unconstitutional behaviour, a complaint upheld by Cato at his most sententious, but also erected billboards on the Palatine advertising a long list of Cicero’s crimes. Even among the shifting sands of the Republic there were some things that never changed.
Yet even as their dog-fight twisted this way and that, the two men found themselves joined by more than mutual hatred. Appius had decided that it was time he became consuclass="underline" hence his trips to Ravenna and Lucca to meet the triumvirs. In return for their backing in the elections for 54 he had offered them the support of himself and his youngest brother. For Pompey in particular, who had spent two years being harried and humiliated by Clodius, this was a rich prize indeed. The inimitable talents of Rome’s greatest rabble-rouser were now the triumvirs’ to do with as they pleased. Just as Cicero had been employed as the tool of Caesar’s interests, so Clodius was put to work serving those of Pompey and Crassus. Orders went out to his network of tribunes and gang-leaders. A campaign of intimidation was launched, its aim to secure the postponement of the consular elections for 55. The violence, as it tended to do whenever Clodius was involved, quickly escalated. A band of senators attempted to block his entry into the Senate House; Clodius’ supporters responded by threatening to burn the Senate House to the ground. Meanwhile, the elections had still not been held, and all the while Rome was filling with the triumvirs’ clients, including a great flood of Caesar’s veterans, given special leave from Gaul. Outraged senators put on mourning. Horrible suspicions crowded their minds. At last the question that had been buzzing around Rome for months was put openly to Pompey and Crassus, both of whom had been attempting, in their most statesmanlike manner, to stay above the fray. Were they planning to stand for the consulship of 55? Crassus, slippery as ever, answered that he would do whatever was best for the Republic, but Pompey, pinned down by insistent questioning, finally blurted out the truth. The carve-up that had enabled them to bury their rivalry stood revealed to the world.