Now at last Pompey’s moment had come. Even Cato, gazing at the charred shell of his ancestor’s monument, had to accept that. Anything was preferable to anarchy. He still could not bring himself to accept a dictatorship, but proposed as a compromise that Pompey should serve for the year as sole consul. The paradoxical nature of such an office was indication enough of the monstrous nature of the times. The Senate met in Pompey’s theatre, and on Bibulus’ motion invited the great man to rescue the Republic. Pompey obliged with brisk and military efficiency. For the first time since the civil war, armed troops were marched into Rome. The gangs of Clodius and Milo proved no match for Pompey’s legionaries. Milo himself was speedily put on trial. Since the charge was the murder of Clodius, Cicero leapt at the chance to defend him. It was his hope, in such a cause, to deliver the speech of his life. His opportunity came on the last day of the trial. That morning he crossed from his mansion on the Palatine to the law courts. Eerie and unprecedented silence cloaked the city. All the shops had been boarded up. Guards had been posted on the corner of every street. Pompey himself was stationed beside the law courts, surrounded by a wall of troops, the sun glinting off the steel of their helmets – and this in the Forum, the very heart of Rome. Cicero, taken aback by the spectacle, lost his nerve. His speech was delivered, we are told by one source, ‘without his customary assurance’.26 Others claimed that he could barely stammer so much as a word. Milo was found guilty. He left that same week for exile in Marseille. Other ringleaders of the mob violence were similarly served. In the space of barely a month peace had been restored to Rome.
Even Cato had to acknowledge that Pompey had done well, though he did so with his customary gracelessness. When Pompey took him aside to thank him for his support, Cato sternly retorted that he had not been supporting Pompey, but Rome. ‘As for advice, he would happily give it in private, if asked, and if he were not asked, then he would give it anyway in public.’27 Disguised as a slap in the face as this offer was, Pompey accepted it gratefully. Even since his return from the East a decade before he had been waiting for such a moment. However begrudgingly, Cato had acknowledged his status as first citizen. At long last, Pompey appeared to have power and respect together.
No wonder that when Caesar, that same new year, having racked his brains to come up with a suitable bride for his partner, had finally proposed his own great-niece Octavia, Pompey had turned down the offer. He had not meant to signal the end of his friendship by this rebuff, merely that it could not be taken for granted. Now that he had been restored to respectability in the eyes of the senatorial establishment, there were bidders for his hand who could offer more than Caesar. Pompey had been eyeing up the daughters of the crème de la crème for a while. One in particular had caught his connoisseur’s eye. The death of young Publius Crassus at Carrhae had left his wife Cornelia a widow. Beautiful and cultivated, she also happened to be exquisitely well connected. The pedigree of her father, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nascia, was sonorously reflected in the roll-call of his names. The fact that Metellus Scipio himself was a vicious nonentity, pre-eminent at nothing save the staging of pornographic floor shows, mattered not the slightest. What did matter was the fact that he was the head of the Metelli, closely related to any number of impressive patricians, and descended from the same Scipios who had defeated Hannibal and captured Carthage. Cornelia’s own delights were an added bonus. Taking a break from cleaning up the streets of Rome, Pompey decked himself out in wedding garlands. It was the fifth occasion on which he had done so. This time round he was twice the age of his new bride. He brushed aside all the predictable jeers. Married life suited him. Above all, it provided him with a salve for his grief over Julia. The happy couple were soon scandalously in love.
A man in the arms of a woman such as Cornelia could know himself to be in the very bosom of the aristocracy. It was a sweet fulfilment, made all the sweeter by the fact that Cato, the man who had pronounced Pompey unworthy of his niece’s hand, had himself once been jilted by Cornelia’s mother. Old rancours ran deep, and there was no love lost between Cato and Metellus Scipio. Even so, when Pompey pronounced that the state of emergency in Rome had been brought under control and invited his father-in-law to serve as consul with him for the remainder of 52 BC, Cato could hardly object. After all, Pompey was behaving with impeccable regard for the constitution. The Republic had been sick, and now it was restored. All was just as it had been in the past.
Pompey’s fellow citizens were desperate to believe this. Even those who had long been suspicious of his ambitions now had their own reasons for acknowledging his pre-eminence. Haughty aristocrats who had seen what Pompey had been able to achieve on behalf of that grand pornographer Metellus Scipio had begun to moderate their disdain. Cato might still clap his hands over his ears whenever Pompey said anything unconstitutional, but in general, and for the first time, he was prepared to give his old opponent a hearing. And then, of course, there was Caesar. In Gaul, amid the blood and smoke of Alesia, Pompey’s partner still looked to him for friendship. Many different interests, many of them irreconcilably opposed – and yet all of them looking for support to a single person.
This was unprecedented in the history of the Republic. No wonder that Cicero found himself marvelling at Pompey’s ‘abilities and good fortune, which have enabled him to achieve what nobody else has ever done’.28 Yet even as the great man exulted in his primacy, each faction competing for his favours was manoeuvring to destroy the others, and force Pompey to identify with them alone. Who was exploiting whom? This was a question that had barely begun to be resolved. Yet it would be soon enough – to the point of destruction and beyond.
Mutually Assured Destruction
The art of theatre-building did not come to an end with the construction of Pompey’s marble monster. If anything, it rose to new heights of rococo ingenuity, as ambitious noblemen competed to lay foundations not of stone but deep within the affections of the Roman people. Most extraordinary of all was a theatre built by Curio, the brilliant young intimate of Clodius. In 53 BC Curio’s father had died. Curio had been in Asia at the time, on provincial duties, but even before his return to Rome he had begun drawing up plans for a series of truly spectacular funeral games. When the theatre that had been designed to stage them was finally unveiled, the audience found to their excitement that they too were to be a feature of the show. Two different stages had been built, complete with banks of seats, both precariously balanced on a revolving pivot. Two plays could be performed simultaneously, and then, at midday, when the acting was done, there would be an immense cranking of machinery, the theatres would revolve, lock together and form a single stage. ‘This was where the gladiators would battle, even though the Roman people themselves, as they spun round in their seats, were in far greater peril than the gladiators.’ More than a century later the elder Pliny could only shake his head in astonishment at the design. ‘And yet that was not the most amazing thing!’ he exclaimed. ‘Even more incredible was the madness of the people. There they sat, perfectly content, in seats which were treacherous and liable to collapse!’29