Here, it might have been thought, in a city as sensitive to omens as Rome, was a wonder pregnant with menace. To later generations, the identification of the Republic with Curio’s amphitheatre – so splendid, so unstable – must have been an obvious one to make. Indeed, it is surely the reason why the memory of it was preserved. But if any of the spectators who risked their necks clambering into the stalls were aware of the portentous nature of what they were doing, then the record of it has failed to survive. The mood of the Republic was fretful, but not apocalyptic. Why would it have been otherwise? Rome’s system of government had endured for almost five hundred years. It had won her a greatness so surpassing that not a king in the world had been able to withstand her. Above all, it gave to every citizen the measurement of himself, the reassurance that he was not a subject or a slave, but a man. A Roman could no more conceive of the Republic’s collapse than he could imagine himself an Egyptian or a Gaul. Fearful of the gods’ anger he may have been, but not to the point of dreading the impossible.
So there was no one to read in the creaking of Curio’s theatre an approaching cataclysm. Just the opposite: to the voters, it ground out a familiar rhythm. Curio had his eye on a tribunate. His theatre was designed not only to honour his dead father, but to advance his ambitions. In that cause, as had become the fashion despite the tears over Pompey’s elephants, the blood of exotic animals had to be spilled. Curio specialised in panthers, a taste he shared with Caelius, who was always badgering contacts in the provinces for more. Both men knew how important it was to cut a dash with the electorate. As Caesar had done before them, they gambled with their futures by running up monstrous debts. Once this might have branded them as lightweights. Now it marked them out as rising stars.
So too did other, more time-tested talents. The Republic still swirled as violently as it had ever done with ambitions, hatreds and intrigues, but Curio and Caelius were both skilled in negotiating such treacherous currents, knowing when to hold fast and when to tack to fresh winds. Principle rarely blinded them to personal advantage. Their own relationship was a case in point. Each could recognise a useful ally in the other, despite the fact that during the perilous days after Clodius’ murder, when the Republic had appeared on the verge of anarchy, they had been on opposite sides. Curio, Clodius’ oldest ally, had remained faithful to the memory of his dead friend, and indeed proved such a comfort to Clodius’ widow Fulvia that the two of them ended up marrying. Caelius, by contrast, had continued his feud with Clodia and her brother with implacable gusto, and in 52 BC, when he was tribune, used the full resources of his office to serve as cheerleader for Milo. A year later, however, when Caelius found himself particularly short of panthers, Curio thought nothing of slipping him twenty of his own. As it had always been, bet-hedging remained a politician’s wisest course.
Except that, on the gravest and most insoluble problem of the day, this was becoming ever more tricky. Ironically, it was Caelius himself who had brought the issue to a head. Midway through 52 the news had reached Rome of Caesar’s victory at Alesia. The city had been full of dark forebodings about the situation in Gaul, and so the realisation that war bands of vengeful barbarians would not be sweeping southwards after all was greeted with an immense outpouring of relief. Twenty days of thanksgiving were voted by the Senate, while Caelius, in his role as tribune, proposed a complementary bill of his own. By its terms Caesar was to be awarded a unique privilege: rather than being obliged to arrive at Rome in person to stand for the consulship – as he had had to do, for instance, in the previous decade – he was to have the right to run for election while remaining in Gaul. All nine of Caelius’ colleagues in the tribunate backed this proposal. The bill duly became law.
But this hardly settled the matter. Instead, it served to open a division in the Senate that was to widen with each passing month, polarising opinion in a way that was to grow steadily more dangerous, until it would finally yawn so unbridgeably that the entire Roman people would find themselves teetering on the edge of a fatal abyss. At the heart of the crisis lay the simple fact that Caesar, if he were permitted to progress seamlessly from Gaul to a second consulship, would at no stage be a private citizen. This, to many, was intolerable – for only a private citizen could be brought to trial. No sooner had Caelius’ bill been passed than Cato was fulminating against it. The criminal actions of Caesar’s first consulship had been neither forgotten nor forgiven. For almost a decade his enemies had been waiting for the opportunity to bring him to account. Now that the chance was nearing they had no intention of being denied their prey.
There were plenty who tried to reconcile the irreconcilable. Caelius, in bringing his bill, had been prompted by Cicero, who counted himself as a friend of both Caesar and Cato. Of course, too – and far more crucially – did Pompey. For a precarious few months he had succeeded in balancing the interests of his old ally and a host of Caesar’s opponents, Cato not least. Having at last won for himself the undisputed pre-eminence he had always craved, Pompey had no wish to see it threatened by having to choose between rival blocs of his supporters. Yet no matter how determinedly he closed his eyes to it, the dilemma refused go away. In the debate on Caesar’s future neither side would accept any hint of a compromise. Both believed themselves utterly, implacably in the right.
For Caesar himself, still wading through the mud and slaughter of Gaul, it was an outrage that he, a proconsul of the Roman people, should be obliged to guard his back against the machinations of petty stay-at-homes like Cato. For almost a decade he had been exerting himself titanically in the cause of the Republic – and was he now, as his reward, to face the ignominy of a trial? Milo’s conviction offered a grim precedent of what might happen to him: the Forum ringed with steel, the defence intimidated, the conviction hurried through. Once he had been found guilty in a court of law, Caesar’s great achievements would help him not a whit. To the cheering of pygmies who had never in their lives rallied an ambushed legion, or planted an eagle beyond the icy northern seas, or defeated in one battle two colossal hordes of barbarians, he would be forced into exile, to spend the rest of his life in the company of men such as Verres, his expectations withering to nothing in the sunshine of Marseille.
Yet the more that Caesar vaunted the exceptional nature of his claims, the more disgusted his many enemies became. Unspoken behind his demands lay the menace of his army, swollen by illegal levies and battle-hardened in the fire of his adventuring. If Caesar were to return home as consul, then he would have no problem in ramming through legislation that would secure farms for his veterans, and a reservoir of armed strength for himself that would put even Pompey in the shade. Rather than permit that, Cato and his allies were prepared to go to any lengths. Interminable disputes over Caesar’s command began to dominate the Senate’s every session. How many legions should he be permitted to keep? When should a successor be nominated? When should Caesar himself have to stand down? ‘You know the form,’ drawled Caelius to Cicero. ‘Some decision will be reached about Gaul. Then someone stands up and complains about it. Then someone else stands up in turn … and so it drags on – a long, elaborate game.’30
Yet arcane though the debate frequently appeared, Caelius’ yawns of boredom were an affectation. He was as penetrating an analyst of folly and ambition as anyone in Rome, and he was starting to recognise what was threatening: a catastrophe so appalling as to seem almost beyond belief. What had begun as a feud of the kind that had always existed in the Republic – indeed, had formed the essence of its politics – was now spreading a contagion of bitterness and antagonism far beyond the ranks of the two rival factions. Cato, determined to destroy Caesar once and for all, was repeating his favourite tactic by spurning all hint of compromise, seeking to isolate his enemy, arraying legitimacy and the name of the Republic itself against him. Caesar, for his part, was flooding Rome with bribes, wooing and cajoling his fellow citizens with all his effortless powers of charm. Most still wished to remain neutral. It was not their quarrel. Yet such were the stakes, they could not help but be caught up on the swell and wash of the arguments. Day by day, month by month, the Roman people were dividing into two. An ill-omened phrase, rarely spoken of as a foreboding since the dark days of Sulla, began to be whispered again: civil war.