Rome: An Empire's Story (26 page)

But the gains outweighed the losses. When Sulla died in 79
BC
Rome had just regained the position of dominant power in the Mediterranean world. Roman forces controlled Italy up to the Alps and most, if not quite all, of the coastal plains of the western Mediterranean. East of the Adriatic she controlled parts of the Balkans and the province of Asia. On the death of Augustus in
AD
14, just under a century later, the territorial empire flanked the Atlantic from the mouth of the Rhine to the Straits of Gibraltar, and surrounded the Mediterranean (Our Sea, as the Romans came to call it) in a ring of provinces and client kingdoms. The Black Sea too was virtually a Roman lake, and Anatolia and the Near East were under Roman control. To the south, the frontier ran along the edge of the Sahara and extended to the southern frontier of Egypt. The eastern limit was fixed by the Euphrates and a line that included most of Anatolia. Its northern boundaries were the Rhine and the Danube. Much of this area was administered through provinces, the rest through client kingdoms which were
closely controlled by Rome. The greater part of this vast extension had been acquired during the period when Pompey, Caesar, and finally Octavian/Augustus had led the state.

Further Reading

Many narratives, and quite a few novels, tell the story of the lives of the great figures of the last days of the Republic. It is also a period that emerges vividly from ancient writings. Plutarch’s lives of Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Crassus, Lucullus, and other figures offer as lively an introduction to these characters as any modern treatment. Even better, Caesar’s
Gallic War
and Cicero’s
Letters
offer actual contemporary witness to the events of the 50s. Sallust’s
Catiline Conspiracy
offers a view of the great crisis of Cicero’s consulship written in the 40s
BC
when the end of the Republic was not yet in sight.

An age dominated by great men is naturally a gift to biographers. Arthur Keaveney’s
Sulla: The Last Republican
(2nd edn. London, 2005) is both learned and lively. Robin Seager’s
Pompey the Great: A Political Biography
(2nd edn. London, 2002) is a classic. Cicero and Caesar have attracted many excellent biographers. For vivid evocation of each figure I recommend Elizabeth Rawson’s
Cicero: A Portrait
(London, 1975) and Adrian Goldsworthy’s
Caesar: The Life of a Colossus
(London, 2006).

Many of Ronald Syme’s interpretations of Roman politics have been challenged, but his
Roman Revolution
(Oxford, 1939) is a gripping read, and in its way is also an interesting document of its age. Our best witness to the imperialism of the age dominated by Pompey and Caesar is Cicero. His own thoughts and words on empire are lucidly discussed in Catherine Steel’s
Cicero, Rhetoric and Empire
(Oxford, 2001). Most ancient writers present this crisis as a Roman tragedy, but they shared it with the entire Mediterranean world. Liv Yarrow’s
Historiography at the End of the Republic
(Oxford, 2006) is a subtle and original exercise in looking in on the Republic’s collapse from the edge of empire.

X
THE ENJOYMENT OF EMPIRE

Since we now rule that race of people among whom civilization did not just arise, but from which it is believed to have spread to all other peoples, we have an obligation to pass on its benefits to them, just as we once received it from their hands. For I am not ashamed to say, all the more so given my life and achievements are proof enough of my energy and seriousness, that whatever I have accomplished I owe to the learning and culture which have been passed down to us in the classics and philosophy of Greece.

(Cicero,
Letter to his Brother Quintus
1.1.27)

The Last Generation of the Free Republic

The Romans who lived between the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar inhabited what was, in some ways, a new world. Italy was now a peninsula full of Roman citizens, a privileged and prosperous land surrounded by subject provinces. The imperial reach of the Roman people was expanding faster than ever before. Their city was transformed year after year, marble monuments like the Theatre of Pompey rising above the ancient tufa temples. The chief beneficiaries of imperial expansion were the Roman aristocracy.
¹
They were richer than ever before, and with their wealth they created a life of luxury for themselves.

Fig 11.
The theatre of Pompey

Roman aristocrats returned to Athens soon after Sulla’s sack, in search of education and high culture. A shipwreck, found a century ago by sponge divers off the island of Antikythera at the southern point of Greece, revealed a cargo of extraordinary statues and other treasure en route for Italy. Excavations of the luxurious villas constructed in the last century
BC
show the probable destinations of such cargoes. Ancestral mansions in the city had been rebuilt on ever more lavish scales since the sixth century, but from the later second century Roman aristocrats had begun to expand their property portfolios. Cicero was far from the richest of senators, but even he owned eight villas. The Roman elite acquired summer retreats in hill towns like Tivoli and Tusculum, and coastal villas within easy reach of the city. The movement to invest the profits of empire in viticulture and other intensive agriculture had led them to acquire great farms in Umbria and Tuscany. By the last century some at least, like Settefinestre, were also pleasant residences. Most gorgeous of all were the sea-front palazzos along the Bay of Naples.
²
The richest villa owners created retreats perched over the sea, equipped with elegant quarters for leisure, dining rooms for summer and winter use,
private baths and fishponds, libraries and gardens adorned with artworks imported from the Greek world. Among the bronzes and marbles there were human treasures too, scholars and craftsmen. Some had come to Rome in chains, others had been attracted by the gifts bestowed on architects and artists, teachers and on writers of all kinds, philosophers, poets, critics, and historians among them.
³
Roman moralists remained anxious about luxury: but what counted as luxury was different now. Building a temporary theatre out of imported coloured marbles and then reusing them in your urban house was luxury. Cicero considered that he lived a life of moderation.

This generation was the same one that witnessed the collapse of their civil society. Many of those who owned the grandest villas would perish in civil wars; indeed some of these rich houses changed hands rapidly when their owners were proscribed. But this same elite—through a mixture of patronage and its own creative activity—presided over the formative period of Roman intellectual culture. And for once we can observe it in vivid detail, partly because of the splendid residences and monuments they built, but also thanks to the survival of the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero and his contemporaries.

An Imperial Life

Cicero was born in 106
BC
into a wealthy Roman family from the town of Arpinum in the Volscian hill country just over 100 kilometres (just over 60 miles) south-east of Rome.
⁴
Arpinum had been ruled by Rome since the late fourth century and its inhabitants had been citizens long before the Social War, but this municipal background only made Cicero keener to fit in and conform. His politics were also much more traditional than blue-blooded radicals like Julius Caesar and the Gracchi brothers. Educated in Rome, he did his military service like any other young equestrian, travelled and studied in Greece, and began to take on legal cases. Roman orators did not charge fees for representing clients, but if successful they won gratitude that might be converted into future support. Besides, legal cases involving the aristocracy in this period were often politicized. Cicero’s first cases were chosen to align himself with critics of the dictatorship of Sulla. The tactic paid off and he was elected as a quaestor for 75
BC
: this was a junior magistracy but one that made him a senator for life. Being the first in his family to win an office of this kind meant he was, like Marius before him, a
novus
homo
, a new man. This was not uncommon. The Senate was always open to new blood, even when proscription and civil war had not created vacancies.
⁵
But being a new man was a position he could exploit throughout his career, representing himself as an underdog when it suited. The quaestorship took him to Sicily for first-hand experience of Roman provincial rule. Many of his early cases involved charges of corruption on the part of governors. Some he defended, others—like Verres—he prosecuted.

Elected praetor in 66
BC
, Cicero spoke persuasively in favour of transferring the command against Mithridates to Pompey. By 63 he was consul—a significant achievement—and he had to deal with Catiline’s attempted coup. Supported at the time in his decision to execute the alleged conspirators, this came back to haunt him, and he was briefly exiled in 58. The consulship was the high point of his influence. Roman politics in the 50s revolved around the alliance between Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus. Cicero was unwilling to support them, and tried (unsuccessfully) to break up their pact. For a while, he was even forced to leave Rome to serve as governor of Cilicia. During the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, he attempted to remain neutral; eventually he chose Pompey’s cause. Caesar’s forgiveness placed him under obligations that effectively drove him out of public life until after the latters murder on the Ides of March 44
BC
. The bulk of his philosophical writing was carried out in the late 50s, when he had been frozen out of politics, and in the last year of Caesar’s dictatorship and the eight months that followed. Cicero was bitterly disappointed that the assassination of Caesar did not restore traditional Republican freedoms as he saw them. Fiercely opposed to Mark Antony, he tried to build up Octavian as a counterweight. But when the two formed an alliance, Cicero was proscribed and he was hunted down and killed in December 43
BC
. His hands and head were displayed in the forum from the speaker’s platform, the Rostra, as a grim warning of the dangers of free speech.

Like all his generation, Cicero pursued his career in the shadow of empire. Empire and the Social War had made the propertied classes of Roman Italy into the elite of an imperial nation.
⁶
Modern empires typically recruited their administrators from the educated middle classes. Participation in running the empire guaranteed them a better lifestyle, and more status than they could hope to enjoy at home. They approached the business of empire as clerks and bureaucrats, ruling by regulation and memorandum. Many became professional servants of empire, and some never returned home. Rome’s empire was different. Aristocrats played the leading role in running it, with
the help of their family members, friends, and slaves. The conduct of governors, generals, and procurators was guided by principles of ethics and custom rather than by standing orders and protocol. And their eyes remained fixed on the network of friends and relatives back home; they did not ‘go native’.

Cicero conformed to this pattern perfectly. Roman governors might display justice and prudence, energy and competence, but there is little sense that any preferred their foreign postings to life back home. What they hoped to bring home were a good reputation (
fama
); the support and gratitude of Roman traders and prominent tax farmers or other aristocrats; maybe even some support from provincial cities or grandees; and of course money. Theft, menaces, and accepting bribes were illegal, but there were other legal if dubious ways of extracting money from provincials, such as money lending at ruinous rates of interest. Cicero evidently tried to imitate famous governors like Quintus Mucius Scaevola the
Pontifex
, proconsul of Asia in 94
BC
and author of an exemplary edict laying down the principles of good government. But in the changed conditions of the 50s
BC
, this resolution brought Cicero only grief.

Cicero experienced the empire from many perspectives.
⁷
As a junior magistrate with financial responsibility in Sicily, he was alternately admiring of and frustrated by the Greek cities of his province. Later in life he had to experience the necessary compromises of a governor, forced to balance the interests of justice with those of his powerful Roman friends back home. As an advocate, he had occasion to speak passionately on behalf of Roman colonists and allies against corruption, and also to urge jurors not to believe non-Roman testimony over the assurances of governors who were noble and Roman. If his orations
Against Verres
are savage condemnations of the abuse of power, his speeches in defence of the governors Flaccus and Fonteius pander to the grossest ethnic prejudices. Most of the issues that confronted him as a politician also seem (to us) to derive from empire. One set derived from the destabilizing effects of massive influxes of wealth, unevenly distributed between rival politicians and social classes, so fuelling the bribery and debt that lay behind Catiline’s coup and the power of Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar. Other political crises were a product of the Republic’s failure to maintain security in the Mediterranean.