Caesar. Life of a Colossus (Adrian Goldsworthy) Yale University Press (20 page)

During his aedileship Caesar spent huge amounts of his own money, supplemented by Bibulus’ cash in their joint projects. The people of Rome revelled in the shows and games put on for free enjoyment. They disliked any hint of stinginess in those staging the games and would hold this against a man in his future career, just as they would gratefully remember someone who was responsible for a truly impressive spectacle. Yet it was not simply a question of throwing money at the projects, for even expensive games could sometimes fall flat if they were not presented well. Caesar never lacked style in anything he did and his games were a great success. From his point of view, the money that had gone to produce this result had been very well spent. It was his personal money only in the sense that he had borrowed it. Even before he had held any elected office, Plutarch tells us that Caesar was 107

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said to have debts of over 1,300 talents – a total of over 31 million sestertii in Roman currency. (To put this into proportion, the minimum property qualification for a member of the equestrian order at a slightly later date, and probably also at the time, was 400,000 sestertii.) This was a staggering sum, which was then massively increased by his spending as curator of the Appian Way and as aedile. Caesar was gambling on his political future being bright and lucrative enough to cancel out his debts. His creditors were taking the same risk, but presumably had confidence in Caesar to do well. The greatest part of this money was most probably owed to Crassus. Caesar was not the only rising senator he funded in this way, but it is unlikely that he gave others as much leeway to keep on borrowing more and more.32

There was one last gesture during Caesar’s aedileship. At some point during the year, most probably before one of the sets of games, he gave orders for Marius’ trophies commemorating his victory over the Cimbri and Teutones to be re-erected in the Forum. Sulla had ordered them to be torn down and probably destroyed, so Caesar most likely had a facsimile set up. As with Julia’s funeral, there was a warm response from much of the population to this gesture. Enough people still remembered the fear that the northern barbarians would spill south into Italy and sack Rome again. Marius had saved Rome from this fate, and that was a deed most felt worthy of celebration. One exception was Quintus Lutatius Catulus, consul in 78 BC and like Caesar a pontiff. His father had been consul with Marius in 102 BC and proconsul in 101 BC and had deeply resented the popular hero receiving most of the credit for their joint success. Catalus was now probably the most respected member of the Senate, even if he was not formally the
princeps senatus
, the man whose name appeared first on the senatorial roll. Emphasis on Marius diminished the glory of Catulus’ own family. He resented this, but if the stories are true he was also beginning to see Caesar as a reckless and potentially dangerous politician. In the Senate Catulus declared that ‘No longer, Caesar, are you undermining the defences of the Republic – now you are launching a direct assault.’ Yet for all the elder statesman’s
auctoritas
, Caesar replied in a speech that was utterly reasonable and convinced most senators of his innocence. They were probably right, for his career was still in most respects conventional, if flamboyant. Yet revolution was in the air.33

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VI

Conspiracy

‘As soon as riches came to be held in honour, and brought glory,
imperium
, and power, virtue began to grow dull; poverty was seen as disgraceful, innocence as malevolence. Therefore because of wealth, our youths were seized by luxury, greed and pride; they stole and squandered; reckoning their own property of little worth, they coveted other peoples’; contemptuous of modesty and chastity, of everything divine or human, they were without thought or restraint.’ –
The senator and historian Sallust, writing in the late forties BC
.1

Late in 66 BC the consular elections for the following year were won by Publius Cornelius Sulla and Publius Autronius Paetus. Sulla was a nephew of the dictator and had become very wealthy during the proscriptions. Brother-in-law to Pompey, he may have enjoyed some popularity by association with the great commander, but Sulla’s success owed far more to his money in elections that were marked by widespread bribery and intimidation. This in itself was nothing unusual.

Throughout the period a long succession of laws were passed to deal with electoral malpractice, but the frequency of such legislation makes clear its ineffectiveness. A recent bill had stipulated that candidates found guilty of such crimes lost not only the office they had secured, but were expelled from the Senate, denied the right to display the symbols of any public office and barred from entering politics again. The two runners-up in the election, Lucius Aurelius Cotta and Lucius Manlius Torquatus, promptly prosecuted the victors under this bribery law. Cotta was the man who as praetor in 70 BC

had brought in the law altering the composition of juries in the courts. By this time he was a year or two overdue for his consulship, which may well have made his defeat rankle even more. Both of his brothers had also already been consul, while Manlius came from a very distinguished patrician line, in contrast to the two victors in the election. Autronius relied more for his defence on using a gang of supporters to intimidate the members of the 109

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court, or, failing that, to break up proceedings. Sulla may or may not have made use of similar tactics – years later Cicero defended him on another charge and blamed all the earlier violence on Autronius. In spite of this the prosecutions were successful, and both men were stripped of their office and expelled from public life. Cotta and Torquatus became the consuls for 65 BC, either because they had gained the most votes after Sulla and Autronius or perhaps following a second election.

The matter does not seem to have ended there. Autronius and Sulla were reluctant to accept their permanent expulsion from politics. There was talk of a plot to assassinate Cotta and Torquatus when they assumed the consulship on 1 January 65 BC. Other leading senators were also to be murdered and the conspirators were then to install themselves in the supreme office. Forewarned of the planned coup, the new consuls were allowed an armed guard by the Senate and the day passed without any violence. Officially a veil of silence was cast over the whole affair, so that Cicero, a praetor in 66

BC, could claim a few years later that he had known nothing about it at the time. In the absence of fact, rumour flourished, especially as the years went by and it was useful to blacken rivals’ names by alleging their involvement in these murky events. It was later alleged that Autronius’ chief ally was Lucius Sergius Catiline, whom we shall encounter later in this chapter. He had just returned from governing Africa as a propraetor and had wanted to become a candidate for the consulship after the dismissal of Sulla and Autronius. The refusal of the presiding magistrate to permit this is supposed to have prompted him to join Autronius in planning to seize power by force. Another man whose name was mentioned was Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso, who had been elected to the quaestorship for 65 BC and was seen as a wild, intemperate man. When the Senate decided soon afterwards to send him to Spain as a propraetor – a most extraordinary appointment for such a young and junior magistrate – this was seen as an indication of their fear of what he might do if allowed to remain in Rome. The stories doubtless grew in the telling, especially after Piso was murdered in his province by some of his own Spanish soldiers. Some claimed these auxiliaries had been prompted by the governor’s tyrannical rule. This was plausible enough, although it should be remembered that of the many oppressive Roman governors only a handful managed to get themselves assassinated. Yet others suggested that the Spanish soldiers were loyal to Pompey, having served under him against Sertorius, and had either been instructed – or decided on their own initiative – to dispose of a potential rival. It was an indication of the nervous mood of these years that such wild tales were circulating.2

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It is in this context that we need to place the version given by Suetonius, in which Crassus and Caesar were in league with Autronius and Sulla. The plan was to massacre their opponents in the Senate, give the consulship to the convicted pair and make Crassus dictator, with Caesar as his deputy, who bore the archaic title of Master of Horse (
Magister Equitum
). Caesar was supposed to have given the signal for the onslaught by letting his toga fall from his shoulder, but did not do so when Crassus failed to turn up, moved by ‘conscience or fear’. The sources named by Suetonius for this incident were all written later by authors hostile to Caesar. The same was true of another tale he mentions, describing how Caesar planned an armed rebellion in concert with Piso, but that this was thwarted by the latter’s murder. As with other claims that he plotted to seize control of the Republic by force from his earliest years, it is likely that these are no more than later propaganda. Caesar, recently elected aedile for 65 BC, had no reason to wish for revolution. He was certainly extremely unlikely to have joined any plot aimed at assassinating his relative Lucius Aurelius Cotta. Similarly, Crassus, who had just won the censorship with Catulus as a colleague, had little to gain from armed rebellion. There was politically motivated rioting during and after the consular elections, and there may even have been a plot of some sort, but the involvement of Caesar or Crassus is surely a later invention.3

There has been a tendency amongst historians ancient and modern to see these years as dominated by rivalry between Crassus and Pompey. In 67

BC Catulus had argued that the command against the pirates gave too much power to any one man. When Pompey was also given responsibility for the war with Mithridates, he came to control far larger forces and could draw on the resources of a far wider area than Sulla at the start of the civil war. Men writing under the rule of the emperors expressed surprise when Pompey chose to lay down this great power on his eventual return to Italy at the end of 62 BC. It was assumed that anyone with the strength to make himself sole ruler at Rome would inevitably crave such dominance. With hindsight we know that this belief was wrong, for Pompey preferred to pursue his ambitions by more conventional means. Cicero’s letters from these years betray no hint that he was worried about the great general following Sulla’s example. It seems unlikely that many other senators expected a fresh civil war, but that is not to say that they considered it to be utterly impossible. Anyone active in public life in these years was old enough to remember the appalling violence of the eighties BC, of proscription lists marking famous men for death and of severed heads decorating the Rostra. All this had 111

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happened in the very heart of Rome and who was to say that it could not happen again? Pompey had been one of the bloodthirsty lieutenants of Sulla, the ‘young executioner’. He appeared to have mellowed as he matured, but he had still spent only a small part of his career in Rome, taking part in the day-to-day business of public life. Everyone knew the figure of the dashing commander, who was adding victories in Asia to those he had already won in Africa, Spain, Sicily and Italy, but how many truly knew the real man and so could be sure how he would behave? The circumstances were very different to the situation that had faced Sulla and effectively backed him into a corner. Yet if someone were to seize power in Rome by force, as the disgruntled consul Cinna had done, who was to say that this would not be the reason, or the pretext, for Pompey to return sword in hand at the head of his army. Such a scenario was all the easier to imagine when elections and trials were being disrupted, and competition between leading senators seemed more desperate than in the past.4

In contrast to Pompey, people knew Crassus, who spent far more time in Rome and was very active in public life. One of the richest men in the Republic

– his fortune probably second only to that of Pompey – Crassus was fond of saying that no man could call himself rich unless he was able to afford to raise his own army. In spite of his wealth, his lifestyle was remarkably frugal in an age of luxury and indulgence. Men like Lucullus and Cicero’s great rival the orator Hortensius paraded their riches in their magnificent houses, villas and gardens, while dining in lavish style on exotic foods. They were famous for the efforts they devoted to construct saltwater ponds, in which they raised sea fish, often as much as pets as for food. Crassus did not waste his money on such whims, and instead devoted great effort to augmenting his already vast fortune. He had interests in many businesses, maintaining close links with the
publicani
and other companies active in the provinces. Most visibly he dealt in property, maintaining hundreds of skilled slaves to develop buildings and increase their value. They included a force trained as a fire brigade, something that did not at this time otherwise exist at Rome. Large parts of the city consisted of narrow streets separating tall, densely packed and often cheaply constructed
insulae
thrown up by landlords keen to profit as much as possible from rents. Fires started easily and spread rapidly, especially in the heat of the Italian summer. Crassus was able to buy up great swathes of Rome at a knock-down price by waiting for a conflagration to begin and then purchasing properties in the path of the fire. Once the deal was done, he called in his fire brigade to fight the flames, usually by demolishing buildings to create a fire-brake. Some of his new purchases were 112

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saved, while his slave artisans were ready to build afresh on the sites of the demolished structures. He seems to have dealt particularly in grander houses for the better off, although like other prominent Romans he may also have owned many blocks of slum flats. The means of acquiring much of his property displayed both determination and ruthlessness. At some point, probably in 73 BC, he was known to have been spending much time with a Vestal Virgin named Licinia. She was formally accused of unchastity, a crime that in the case of the Vestals was punished by being entombed alive. The case was dismissed when Crassus announced that he was intent on buying a house from Licinia, whose name suggests she might well have been a relative. So convinced was everyone of his enthusiasm for acquiring new properties that this was accepted as far more probable than the idea that they were having an affair. Licinia was acquitted, but Crassus is supposed to have kept hovering around her until she finally sold him the house.5