The next one hundred and fifty years would see further acquisitions. In the main, these were a form of extremely aggressive consolidation. They guarded against the Celtic threat from the north, Rome’s recurrent nightmare since the capture of the city in the fourth century. In the 50s, Gaius Julius Caesar conquered and annexed Gaul (roughly equivalent to France), and that was followed a century later by the invasion of Britannia under the emperor Claudius. During the same period, the conquest of all Spain was finally concluded and Rome’s northern frontier was extended to the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, a strong defensive position. With the death of Cleopatra, Egypt changed from being a client kingdom to a Roman province. The empire had found its natural frontiers.
SULLA’S HOPES WERE posthumously dashed; by reducing the power of the People, reinforcing that of the Senate, and curbing that of overmighty proconsuls at the head of armies, he had intended to restore constitutional stability. But the bad example he set by marching on Rome was more attractive to his successors than were his good intentions. The Proscription (and Marius’s earlier massacres) revealed a fateful truth: the ruling class had forgotten the imaginative tolerance it showed during the Conflict of the Orders.
The reforms Sulla introduced came too late to do any good. The governing system had broken down beyond repair. For this, there were interlocking reasons. First, as noted, the enfranchisement of all Italy meant that a People’s Assembly, suitable for a small city-state, lost its democratic legitimacy, because most citizens were unable to attend its meetings. From being guardians of the popular interest, tribunes became managers of the city mob and so were able to hijack the powers of government from the Senate. This upset the balance between the “mixed” constitution’s three component parts (as Polybius and Cicero saw it)—namely, the principles of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy as represented by the consuls, the Senate, and the People.
The arrival of empire greatly complicated the business of government. An arrangement whereby all executive posts were subject to annual election made strategic planning difficult, if not impossible. There was not enough talent in the aristocracy to ensure competent administration. It proved impractical to supervise provincial governors and prevent them from making fortunes through extortion and fraud. In theory, the Senate was a forum where long-term issues could be thrashed out, but the attacks on it by populist tribunes weakened its authority.
Major crises in distant corners of the Mediterranean meant that the rules had to be bent. A handful of able and ambitious men, supported by the People, were able to insist on special commands that would inevitably last for a number of years (for instance, both Sulla’s and Pompey’s eastern commissions to suppress Mithridates).
The decline of the class of rural smallholders, which used to supply the legions with recruits, and the transformation of a citizens’ militia into a professional army with long terms of service meant that soldiers were no longer primarily loyal to the state. Rather, they relied on their generals to look after their interests. The selfish reluctance of senators to reward demobilizing soldiers with grants of farming land only made the situation worse.
IT DID NOT take long for Sulla’s legislation to be unpicked. Pompey entered into a political alliance with a daring financial speculator, Marcus Licinius Crassus. The Senate was too weak to prevent them from becoming consuls in 70 (although they were conspicuously unqualified to stand) and from restoring the powers of the tribunes of the plebs.
However, it was not too weak to snub them. The latest in a series of special commands was the conduct of the war against Mithridates. After Pompey’s spectacular triumph, he was due to disband his army, but the Senate refused to help. The most brilliant politician of the age was a blue-blooded popularis, Gaius Julius Caesar. He persuaded Pompey and Crassus, who had fallen out, to join him in a secret alliance, which came to be known as the First Triumvirate.
Pooling their resources—clients as well as cash—the three men took control of the state. Caesar was elected consul for 59. Ignoring his consular colleague’s attempts at obstruction, he passed a law settling Pompey’s soldiers and obtained special commands for Crassus and himself. Crassus led an expedition against the Parthian Empire but found that his reach failed to exceed his grasp. In short order, he was defeated and killed.
Caesar did much better. He spent ten years conquering the Celtic tribes of Gaul, showing himself to be as brilliant in the field as he was in the Forum. He only returned to domestic politics in 50. He intended to stand for the consulship again, but the Senate blocked him on an electoral technicality. So Caesar led his legions across a little stream called the Rubicon, which marked the frontier between the province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy itself. “The dice have been thrown,” he remarked dryly. The Senate won Pompey to its side and fought back, but Caesar defeated his old partner in a great battle at Pharsalus, in central Greece. Pompey fled to Egypt, where the nervous authorities had him killed.
By 45, the war was over and Caesar was master of the Roman world. He did not intend to repeat Sulla’s mistake and retire early. He appointed himself dictator for life. This was tantamount to being king, the unforgivable crime. On the Ides of March in 44 B.C., during a meeting of the Senate, he was stabbed to death by angry aristocrats. He collapsed at the feet of a statue of Pompey the Great.
Another fourteen years were to pass before peace returned to the empire. Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian, an inexperienced but clever eighteen-year-old, and Mark Antony, an able but idle military commander who had been one of Caesar’s henchmen, launched a Proscription as savage as that of Sulla. After defeating Caesar’s assassins at Philippi, they divided the empire between them. Octavian took the West and Antony the East. As far as they were concerned, the Republic was dead. They, too, then fell out, however. Another civil war ensued, which Octavian won at the sea battle of Actium.
In 27, with breathtaking dexterity, he brought back the Republic—but in name only. Renamed Augustus, the Revered One, he restored elections, and political life seemed to return to normal. However, he made sure to maintain control over the legions, and he was given a tribune’s powers regularly renewed—the veto, authority to table laws, personal inviolability—but without the tiresome obligation of actually having to hold the office. The ruling class, decimated in the wars, accepted the pretense.
A little more than one hundred years had passed since the tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus and almost exactly fifty years since the reign of Sulla, the Sullanum regnum. Like the inexorable plot of a Greek tragedy, the consequences of the constitutional breakdown they brought about had finally worked themselves out.
18
Afterword
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID THAT HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors, but in the case of Rome it was the losers who commandeered the narrative. Even those who published under the severe gaze of the emperors looked back on the Roman Republic with respect and nostalgia. For this, Cicero and Varro can take much of the credit. They committed scholarly errors and misjudgments, but, like a sacred flame, they preserved the spirit of the Republic that was dying.
They were political failures. Enemies of Julius Caesar, they witnessed the destruction of all their hopes. Varro made his peace with the great dictator, won over by a commission to establish Rome’s first public library; he died in his bed at the ripe age of eighty-nine. Cicero was made of sterner stuff. After the Ides of March, he bravely returned to politics. He tried to save the Republic, but fell victim to Octavian and Mark Antony’s Proscription.