A Criminal History of Mankind (30 page)

At the end, he lived up to his nickname of Lucky Sulla. Instead of suffering the fate of men who are universally hated and feared, he laid aside the responsibilities of office, retired to his estate and died peacefully in his bed. As an old soldier, he found politics boring. We may also suspect that he felt that these degenerate Romans were not worth the waste of his time. Sulla had been born in the days of the third Punic war, when Rome was still proud, independent and democratic. Now most of the old breed were dead - many of them executed by Marius - and the rest were like sheep. The true ‘decline’ of Rome had begun.

What had happened? We have seen that Rome’s lasting problems began when she set out to conquer the Mediterranean, and became the richest city in the world. But the problem went deeper than that. In the year that the first war with Carthage began - 264 B.C. - a king named Asoka came to the throne in India; and, like most empire builders, he went to war to establish his position. The war was entirely successful, but Asoka was revolted by the slaughter. He decided that he would establish a different kind of empire - a religious empire. It was the faith of Gautama, the Buddha, that made the deepest appeal to Asoka, with its teaching that men’s desires only bring them suffering and that the escape is to lead a life of moderation with the mind directed towards Enlightenment. Asoka’s empire spread like that of Alexander the Great, but by entirely peaceful means.

It is an interesting historical fact that the craving for enlightenment, for salvation or inner wisdom, spread across the civilised world from a number of completely independent points at roughly the same time - the fifth century B.C. In Greece there was Socrates, in Persia, Zoroaster, in Israel, Jeremiah, in China, Confucius, Lao Tzu and Mo Tzu, in India, the Buddha, Mahavira - founder of Jainism - and Vyasa, legendary author of the
Mahabharata
. It arouses the vague suspicion that great ideas are diffused by a kind of telepathy when the human race is ready for them. All these teachers have in common a certain basic recognition: that although our desires grope instinctively towards physical fulfilment - food, sex, pleasure, security - they can never be fully satisfied by the physical world. They always leave behind a curious craving for something more, something deeper. Like an alcoholic, man seems to be driven by a perpetual thirst; but there is no wine that can slake it. Socrates believed it was a craving for knowledge; the Buddha, a craving for eternity; the Jewish prophets, a craving for God. Yet all have in common the insight that it is a desire for inner peace, a certain access to some inner world, and that our preoccupation with the material world is the result of some kind of confusion.

The Romans seem to have been completely devoid of this insight. Their immense vitality found its highest expression in self-control, self-discipline. They lacked the evolutionary appetite for wisdom or the mystical craving for eternity. Like all ancient peoples, they possessed strong religious beliefs; but these expressed themselves in the form of superstitions: sacrifices to the gods, belief in oracles and omens. To us, these seem to have as little to do with religion as crossing yourself to avert the evil eye has to do with Christianity.

In its mystical or evolutionary form, the religious impulse may be seen as man’s attempt to escape the limitations of left-brain consciousness. Human beings, alone of all animals, developed this divided form of consciousness in order to be able to
concentrate on the particular
. We needed to learn to cope with problems and intricacies that would have given any other creature a nervous breakdown. This ability carries heavy penalties: tension, headache, exasperation, a sense of entrapment.

For various reasons, the people of Europe developed left-brain consciousness a great deal faster than the people of the east - of India and China, for example. This could simply be due to later development in the east; rice was not introduced into China until 2000 B.C., bringing about an agricultural revolution that made large communities possible. Even under the Shang dynasty, which began around 1500 B.C. - the time of the destruction of the Minoan Empire - China remained a country of small villages and farms. The sheer vastness of the country meant that the majority of its people lived in peace, far from the incursions of border raiders - it was not until the third century B.C. that Shih Huang ordered the building of the Great Wall. Similar reasons probably explain why India remained an essentially ‘right-brain’ culture, even after the incursion of the Aryans - who became an aristocratic warrior class - around 1500 B.C. (Again, we observe this odd coincidence of dates.) India’s first contact with the megalomaniac left-brain mentality occurred when Alexander the Great invaded in 327 B.C. (although the Persians had made north-western India a province two centuries earlier). And Alexander’s conquests hardly took him beyond the Indus. Significantly, the unrest that followed his death led to the founding of the first Indian Empire under Chandragupta. Asoka was his grandson; and we have seen that he gave a completely new meaning to the notion of empire.

It was probably the earlier rise of agriculture in the Mediterranean - the ability of its farmers to feed large conglomerations of people - that led to its accelerated development; so did the fact that it was so much more vulnerable to invasion. The Romans developed from simple agriculturalists to empire builders in a few centuries, while the same development in China and India took millennia. The Mediterranean was a Darwinian forcing house, where success was achieved at the cost of ruthlessness. The Greeks had been concerned with questions about the universe and the nature and destiny of man; but the miseries of the Peloponnesian war made the Athenians as cruel and ruthless as the Romans who later destroyed Carthage. When Melos expressed a desire for independence in 428 B.C. the Athenians killed all the males and sold the women and children into slavery. Thucydides said that the trouble with Athens was that it was unable to make up its mind; new leaders would be elected one day and executed the next. The philosophical temperament was unfitted for survival in the Mediterranean.

No one could accuse the Romans of being unable to make up their minds. When they made a decision, they stuck to it. And while Rome was fighting for its life against Etruscans and Gauls, this quality gave them greatness. The Etruscans were also philosophers; they had a touch of the eastern temperament; they vanished from history. Rome, with the magnificent simplicity of a healthy peasant, went on cutting down its enemies with the short sword. The riches of Carthage made the Romans greedy; and, like the Persians before them, they began to pay too much attention to the pleasures of the bed and the table. In this new situation of ‘conspicuous consumption’, the lack of imagination that had made them great now made them brutish and short sighted - neither of them qualities that conduce to survival. At the point when the Romans could afford to be influenced by the Greeks and think about larger questions, they were incapable of thinking beyond the needs of the present moment. So in spite of emperors like Augustus, Claudius, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, the decline of Rome was irreversible.

The rest of the story of Rome is mainly one of criminal violence. It began immediately after the death of Sulla in 78 B.C. The roads of Italy, and even of Rome itself, were overrun with robbers and murder became commonplace. The sea was suddenly full of pirates - Mommsen calls it ‘the golden age of buccaneers’. It became so bad that only about a third of the corn Rome imported from Africa and Egypt actually reached Roman ports. Pirate vessels were usually light craft with shallow draught and a formidable turn of speed. They could follow a merchantman at a distance, too low in the water to be seen, and attack by night - sometimes even following the merchantman into port, killing the man on watch and slipping out again before dawn loaded with plunder. Men and women were prized as much as other booty, for they could be sold as slaves. The Greek island of Delos became virtually a slave market, with tens of thousands changing hands every day. The pirates were soon strong enough and rich enough to demand ‘protection’ money from ports and to use them when they needed repairs. The province of Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey, became a pirate stronghold. Rome was largely responsible for all these outlaws, for the destruction of cities like Corinth and Carthage had left large numbers of people with no other means of livelihood.

Five years after the death of Sulla, a gladiator named Spartacus - a deserter from the Roman army who had been caught and enslaved - escaped from the gladiator school at Capua and hid on Mount Vesuvius, together with a small band of slaves. As other slaves heard about the group, they came and joined them. Then, because they knew they would be tortured to death if they were recaptured, they fought like demons against the armies sent out against them and achieved a remarkable series of victories. The Romans were stunned - they had come to believe that their armies were invincible. Worse still, they had no competent general to send against the rebels - their best man, Pompey, was away in Spain fighting another rebel. Eventually, the Romans decided to appoint a millionaire called Crassus - an opportunist who had made his fortune buying up the land of proscribed senators and by setting up Rome’s first fire brigade.

Crassus was lucky. Their string of victories had turned the slaves into a murderous rabble whose only interests were murder and rape. On a small scale, Spartacus’s slaves were repeating the history of Rome: effort and determination leading to success, and success leading to degeneration and viciousness. Drunk with revenge and plunder, the slaves refused Spartacus’s pleas to leave Italy; they were enjoying themselves too much. Against Spartacus’s better judgement, they charged into battle against the well-trained Roman army, which hacked them to pieces. Spartacus was killed in battle and six thousand of his followers were crucified along the road to Rome.

Pompey came rushing back from Spain in time to cut down the fugitives. He then managed to arrive in Rome before Crassus and was awarded a full-scale triumph; Crassus had to be content with a more modest victory parade.

This Pompey - known as ‘the Great’ after an early triumph in Africa - was another soldier cast in the same mould as Marius and Sulla: a formidable general (with more than a touch of vainglory), an honest man, but a less than brilliant politician. Two years after his ‘victory’ over Spartacus, he stood for consul; when the patricians rejected him as too young (he was thirty-six) he changed sides and joined the people’s party, of which Crassus was a leading light. So was a younger man named Julius Caesar, a nephew of Marius, whose talents had been so obvious when he was in his early twenties that it was only with difficulty that the dictator Sulla was dissuaded from having him killed. Like his uncle Marius, Caesar dreamed of glory and triumph. This oddly assorted trio - the egotistical general, the good natured millionaire and the rather foppish young intellectual - entered into a partnership that would eventually make them masters of Rome.

During the war with Spartacus, the pirates had become bolder than ever and the Romans were desperate. Half their corn was being intercepted. Coastal towns had been raided and sacked so many times that the survivors had simply moved inland. The pirates landed where they pleased, and often roamed around until they found someone who was worth kidnapping for ransom. When they had raided a town or village, they relaxed on the sea shore to enjoy themselves; but - unlike Ulysses - they were seldom surprised by an avenging army. The Romans felt a terrible sense of helplessness: there were so many pirate vessels all over the Mediterranean, and the strongest army could do nothing against them.

In 68 B.C., Pompey and his supporters persuaded the people of Rome that something had to be done, even if it cost thousands of talents. The following year, Pompey raised 120,000 men, 270 ships, and 6,000 talents (about six million pounds). He knew which towns were pirate strongholds. It was a matter of attacking them all at once so that the pirates could not co-operate or reinforce one another. He had been given three years to complete his task. He struck so suddenly and violently that he completed half of it in the first forty days. The Romans were poor seamen, but it turned out that this made no difference. The pirates fled into their strongholds as soon as the Romans appeared on the horizon, and then Roman soldiers poured on shore and drove them out. These murderers and robbers were no match for trained Roman legions; and when the word got around that Pompey would be merciful to all who surrendered, they gave up by the thousand. Mithridates of Pontus, who had supported the pirates of Cilicia, watched in dismay as the strongholds crumbled. Twenty thousand pirates were captured, ten thousand killed, and all their strongholds and shipyards destroyed. Then, instead of crucifying his captives, Pompey resettled them in some of the abandoned towns, knowing that most of them would settle down to earning a respectable living when given the chance. He proved to be correct. In three months, Pompey put an end to Mediterranean piracy.

After this triumph the Roman people were convinced that Pompey was irresistible, so they sent him with an army to Asia Minor to finish off Mithridates, who was now being more troublesome than ever - encouraging his son-in-law Tigranes to annex Syria and Cappadocia. Pompey captured Tigranes, and pursued Mithridates to the Crimea, where the latter committed suicide on hearing that his son had rebelled. Pompey, apparently unstoppable, went on and conquered Jerusalem, and marched as far as the Caspian Sea. His achievement was as remarkable, in its way, as that of Alexander the Great.

Meanwhile Pompey’s ally Julius Caesar was making a name for himself in Spain. This Caesar was a remarkable young man, but no one expected him to become a great national leader. As a youth he had been fashionably ‘precious’, writing poetry, perfuming and curling his hair and having love affairs - apparently with men as well as women. He was regarded much as Oscar Wilde was in the 1890s. Mommsen describes him as Rome’s sole creative genius; but, like most Romans, Caesar lacked the imagination to be genuinely creative. He also possessed a good measure of the Roman ruthlessness. As a young man, he had been captured by pirates, who had told him they wanted twenty talents ransom; Caesar said haughtily that they were insulting him and he would give them fifty. Waiting for the ransom to arrive, he lived among them as if they were his servants, telling them to be quiet when he wanted to sleep. He joined in their games and made them sit and listen while he read them his poetry; when they proved less than appreciative, he called them barbarians and told them he would have them crucified when he was freed. They laughed indulgently at the spoilt and imperious young man. As soon as the ransom arrived, Caesar hurried to the nearest port - Miletus in Asia Minor - commandeered several ships and returned to surprise the pirates. He then had them crucified but, as a humane concession, cut their throats before nailing them to the cross.