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The Year One by M.I. Finley (1968)

History tends to be the history of the winners, with the losers assigned the passive, largely unvoiced, faceless role of the people on whom the winners operated.
(‘Aspects of Antiquity’, page 189)

Notes on ‘The Year One’, a short essay included in Finley’s 1968 collection, ‘Aspects of Antiquity’.

Ancient calendars

People living through a momentous year (1066, 1789, 1939, 2000) usually know about it. The most obvious thing to say about the year 1 is nobody living through it knew about it at the time. The entire chronological framework of Western civilisation, whereby we divide years into before Christ (BC) or after Christ (in the year of the Lord, anno Domini, AD) hadn’t been invented.

Instead, all the different cultures of the ancient world kept their own calendars relating to their own cultural landmarks. The Greeks thought in terms of four year blocks or ‘Olympiads’ which began with the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, so year one was the first year of the 195th Olympiad.

The Romans had, for centuries, dated events by referring to the two consuls who were in office for that year, thus ‘in the consulship of Caius Caesar, son of Augustus, and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of Paullus.’

Only the learned wanted to look back deeper than a few decades and, for those purposes, Roman historians had worked out the year of the legendary foundation of Rome, and dated everything AUC standing for ‘ab urbe condita’ or ‘since the founding of the city (Rome)’. Many centuries later Christian historians aligned this legendary date to 753 years before the birth of Christ. So the year one was 754 AUC. This system was devised by the Christian historian Dionysius Exiguus, a Greek-speaking monk.

The evidence of the gospels

Of the four gospels only two give details of the birth of Jesus, Matthew and Luke

Matthew’s Gospel

Matthew’s gospel includes the story of ‘the massacre of the innocents’ (chapter 2, verses 16 to 18). Herod the Great, king of Judea, is said to have heard a prophecy that his kingdom will be overthrown by a child about to be born in Bethlehem, so he ordered the execution of all male children aged two and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The Catholic Church regards them as the first Christian martyrs, and their feast – Holy Innocents’ Day (or the Feast of the Holy Innocents) – is celebrated on 28 December. In this story, Joseph and Mary were warned by angels about the impending massacre and so made their way secretly to Egypt, ‘The Flight to Egypt’, a journey depicted in countless paintings.

Unfortunately for the veracity of this version, Herod the Great died in 4 BC. If Matthew is literally correct, Jesus must have been born in 4 BC at the latest.

Luke’s Gospel

Luke’s story is different. He says the Romans sent out a decree that everyone had to return to their home town in order to take part in a national census of the population of Judea so they could be taxed more efficiently.

Unfortunately, the only census decreed by the Romans that we know of occurred in either 6 or 7 AD.

In 6 AD the Romans deposed Herod’s son, Archelaus, themselves took over Judea, and installed a Roman governor with instructions to conduct a census. (The northern province of Galilee remained under the rule of the Herod family; Finley says this slight inconsistency between direct and indirect rule was common in provinces on the edge of the empire.)

The Roman Empire

Was an empire in the full sense. The ‘Roman people’ i.e. citizens of Rome and central and northern Italy, ruled all the other inhabitants of the empire as subjects. The empire outside Italy was divided into provinciae. In 1 AD the Roman empire covered about 1,250,000 square miles with a population of about 60 million (population figures are deeply contested). Censuses were taken in the provinces to maximise tax revenue, but at different times in different provinces, using different methods and definitions, so…

The tax collector, along with the soldier, was the most obvious and ubiquitous link between the provinces and Rome. (p.187)

The limits of Empire

In 9 AD a Romanised German warrior chief named Arminius lured three legions into an ambush in the Teutoburg Forest and annihilated them, seizing the precious standards. Traumatised by this terrible news, the emperor Augustus ordered the remaining two legions and all Roman citizens to withdraw back across the Rhine, a decision reinforced by his successor Tiberius, which crystallised into a fiat. The Romans never attempted to conquer and colonise Germany and the north European border settled for the next four centuries along the Rhine-Danube line.

The borders finalised as England in the north-west, the Atlantic in the west, the Atlas mountains, the Sahara and the cataracts of the Nile in Africa, Judea in what is now the Middle East, and Asia i.e. half of Anatolia up to the border with Armenia.

Imperial exploitation

The Romans had no shortage of writers and propagandists (Horace, Virgil and so on) praising Augustus’ rule and, by extension, Rome’s right to rule the entire world (Virgil). The Christian European empires 1700 years later (Spain, France, Britain, Holland) made lengthy attempts to justify their imperial conquests in terms of bringing civilisation etc to barbarian lands. The Romans used the same rhetoric but were much more honest about the sheer greed and looting involved in conquest. As Finley says in his essay about slavery, Julius Caesar set out for Gaul a penniless aristocrat from a down-at-heel family and he returned 8 years later a multi-millionaire and the most powerful man in Rome. That’s what 8 years of burning and looting did for him.

Once a province had been conquered and pacified there an infrastructure was imposed designed to extract wealth, consisting of extensive taxes(in goods and services and money) for the state, but great personal income skimmed off by high officials and members of the tax farming corporations.

Rome had no mission to civilise comparable to France’s great pretension to a mission civilisatrice. Some of her propagandists later developed this idea but the reality was that, so long as they paid their taxes, Rome left her subject peoples largely to themselves, only interfering if there was disorder, rebellion etc. Over a century of conquering and administering other peoples had shown that minimal interference paid off and…was cheap to run.

This was particularly true in the East, which had well-established cultures/civilisations long before the Romans arrived. Latin was the language of the new rulers but Greek remained the language of intellectuals and the ruling classes which sat directly below the Roman governor. Educated Romans learned Greeks but Greeks rarely bothered to learn Latin, a far simpler, cruder language.

Josephus

Finley makes a pit stop to spend a page profiling Joseph ben Matthias, member of a Jewish priestly family known to history as Josephus and for the epic history of the Jewish War, an account of the 4-year rebellion of Jews against Roman rule 66 to 70 AD which led up to the Romans storming Jerusalem and destroying the Great Temple built by Herod.

Josephus was a Pharisee, a member of the elite priestly caste who identified with law and order and the Romans, so the enemies in his book are the Zealots, who he calls rebels and bandits, religious visionaries who stirred up the people to revolt by playing on their grievances, their extreme poverty and promises of a new world.

Augustus

The essay then turns to consider Augustus’s achievement, namely bringing to an end 60 odd years of chaos as the Roman Republic proved incapable of managing its empire, or, more precisely, the scale of the wealth and power pouring into Rome exacerbate the toxic rivalries among great men which had previously been contained by its republican institutions, but now boiled over into repeated civil wars by over-mighty rulers. Until Octavian put a stop to it (helped by the fact that all the eminent men of his generation had been killed in the civil wars, committed suicide or been murdered in his ‘proscriptions’, leaving him the last significant military-political figure standing).

Augustus’s titles

In 27 BC Octavian was awarded the title ‘Augustus’ by the senate. But his other titles are significant. He wanted to be known as ‘princeps’ i.e. principle figure, partly because it avoided the dreaded term rex or king. And also kept the title Imperator, originally given to victorious generals, but now awarded him a) as recognition of victorious campaigns but b) as continual reminder of where his power lay – the complete loyalty of the army.

Around the time of Christ’s birth, in 2 AD Augustus was awarded a further title, ‘Father of the Nation’, which is not as cuddly as it sounds, given the draconian authority the father of a family had over all its other members, male or female.

Augustus tries to ensure heirs

In his magisterial biography of Augustus Adrian Goldsworthy goes out of his way to emphasise that through most of his rule Augustus appears to have not wanted to create a dynasty and been succeeded by one heir. On the contrary he tried to create a cohort of experienced young men who, Goldsworthy thinks, were meant to form a small cabinet, to rule collegiately.

The two problems with this was that they all tended to come from within his own close family, so royal, monarchical, imperial logic was hard to deny – but worse, that almost all his proteges died, leaving, the grumpy, surly, graceless Tiberius as the last most obvious figure standing.

But before all this had become clear Augustus spent time and energy grooming a succession of young male relatives for rule and in doing so rode roughshod over many of the conventions of the Republic he claimed to be defending. Thus in 4 BC the Senate was prevailed upon to decree that Augustus’s two grandsons (who he had adopted to make legally his sons) Gaius and Lucius, should be designated consuls at the tender age of 15 and then awarded the actual posts, for a year, when they turned 20. Each was titled ‘Princeps of the Youth’. In the Year One Gaius was indeed ‘elected’ consul (as everyone the Princeps recommended to the voters tended to be). But then the curse struck…Lucius died in 2 AD, Gaius in 4 AD.

Augustus’s propaganda machine

Augustus had statues of himself carved and erected in cities all over the empire. Instead of realistic depictions they show an idealised, tall virile commander of men. He ensured his face was on all coinage, so even the illiterate knew who he was. He encouraged his inclusion in the ceremonies of all the religions and cults practiced across the empire. Via his unofficial minister of the arts, Maecenas, he ‘encouraged’ praise by the leading poets of the day, poets like Virgil, Horace and Ovid whose words of sycophantic praise have survived down to our time, 2,000 years later.

Augustus’s campaign for moral regeneration

Alongside a major programme of rebuilding and renovating not only Rome but all the major cities in the Empire, Augustus tried to bring about a moral revival as well. He had roughly two concerns: one was that the ancient noble families of Rome had been severely depleted by the civil wars and so he passed successive legislation promoting marriage and punishing adult men who failed to marry or have children. He gave legal and financial incentives to families with three or more children – legislation collectively known as the Leges Iuliae.

Augustus wasn’t concerned about sexual morality as such but was concerned about its impact on the stability and fecundity of the ruling class which he wanted to grow and stabilise in order to secure Rome’s future. It’s in this context that he passed legislation severely punishing adultery. He wanted more sons of the aristocracy, and that they should marry and do their military and civic duty, instead of not marrying and frittering away their family fortunes on increasing displays of opulence.

Exiling the Julias

It was in this context that in 2 BC he exiled his only biological child, his daughter Julia the Elder (39 BC to 14 AD), who he married to an unwilling Tiberius, allegedly for flagrant adultery and sexual depravity. Several men who had allegedly been her partners were also exiled. In 8 AD he similarly exiled Julia the Elder’s daughter and so Augustus’s grand-daughter, Julia the Younger, again for adultery.

On each of these occasions the ostensible reason was breaching the emperor’s own code of morality, but he also spoke about Julia the Elder being involved in some kind of plot against his life. The details remain obscure but most modern historians think there was more to both affairs than meets the eye, and that in both cases the exiled women were in some way figureheads of attempts to overthrow Augustus’s rule. Hence historians speak of a ‘Julian’ party at his court.

Although the details continue to elude us, Finley draws the central point which is that as soon as you have courts you have courtly intrigue, you have palace plotting – in the later empire this kind of conspiracy became endemic but it is instructive to note that it appears to have arisen as soon as there was a court, in the close family of the very first emperor.

Ovid is exiled

This is the view of Peter Green who devotes most of the long 80-page introduction to his translation of Ovid’s Art of Love to a forensic analysis of events and accusations surrounding the 8 AD exiling of Julia the Younger, because the poet was caught up in the same event and, with little or no warning, exiled by Augustus to the furthest border of the Roman empire, to the miserable provincial town of Tomis on the Black Sea. Ovid wrote a large number of letters to former friends and officials begging to be allowed to return, and a series of poems elaborating on the wretchedness of his fate – but to no avail. Even when Augustus died, his successor, Tiberius, renewed his exile and Ovid died miserably, far from his beloved Rome.

Frustratingly, despite writing a huge amount about his exile, Ovid never anywhere specifies the nature of his error. He insists it was minor, that he never plotted against the emperor, or planned to use poison or a knife or anything like that. Green weighs all the evidence and thinks Ovid must have seen something or been present at meetings where such plots were discussed and failed to report them to the authorities. Because he wasn’t an active plotter, Ovid’s life was spared; but because he didn’t report whatever he saw, his lack of loyalty to the emperor – and to the entire peaceful regime which Augustus had spent a lifetime creating – was called into doubt. Hence exile.

The Augustan peace

It’s easy to criticise Augustus’s early career, his cut-throat manoeuvres, his participation in the proscriptions i.e. mass murder of anyone who stood in the way of the Second Triumvirate, his hugely unpopular land redistribution away from traditional farmer and to veterans of the military campaigns leading up to the decisive Battle of Philippi. But by these expedients he secured the end of the civil wars which had lasted as long as anyone could remember, brought military, civil and social peace, order and stability. He secured the longest period of continuous peace the Mediterranean world had ever known. In this atmosphere of peace and stability business flourished and people got rich.

If the theatre was the characteristic secular building of the ancient Greeks, the amphitheatre was its Roman counterpart, and the long peace saw them built in cities all around the Central Sea.

Augustus worship

The result, especially in the East, was that people began to worship Augustus:

as Saviour, Benefactor and God Manifest (Epiphanes) just as they had deified a succession of Ptolemies, Seleucids and other rulers of the preceding centuries. (p.194)

In Rome he couldn’t be worshipped as a god while alive, only his spirit was said to be holy. But the east had no such hesitations and built temples to Augustus the god. This had nothing to do with love or respect but simple pragmatism. Most people were utterly powerless to influence events, least of all the slaves. It made simple sense to venerate and appease the mighty; that was the way of the world. Finley draws the major conclusion with huge implications for the growth of Christianity, that:

Religion became increasingly centred on salvation in the next world, whereas it had once been chiefly concerned with life in this one. (p.194)

Client kings and dependent rulers had a vested interest in encouraging the cult of Augustus as it underpinned their own authority, for most of the East was a patchwork of cults and religions which, for the most part, co-existed peacefully enough.

The Jewish Revolt

The Jews stood apart in their fierce insistence on monotheism. Jews had migrated and had communities all around the Mediterranean and in Rome (where Ovid recommends the synagogue as a good place to pick up women in The Art of Love). The Old Testament writings had been translated into Greek as far back as the third century BC as Jews in the diaspora lost touch with Hebrew.

Herod the Great, King of Judaea, had more in common with his Roman rulers than his Jewish subjects. When he introduced an amphitheatre and gladiator fights in the Roman style there were mutterings of discontent, but when he tried to impose official worship of Augustus the god there was an outcry and an assassination attempt.

The Jews’ dogged insistence on the uniqueness of their god puzzled the Romans (and their neighbours). Neither Augustus nor Tiberius took any steps against the Jews, but Roman officials in the provinces were less tolerant and insistence on conformity to Augustus worship or other religious practices led to repeated clashes. Many Jews were nervous of their masters’ lack of understanding and religious extremists – the Zealots so criticised by Josephus – played on these fears and encouraged proactive rebellion.

All these forces led to the outbreak of the First Jewish–Roman War (66 to 73 AD), sometimes called the Great Jewish Revolt or The Jewish War. It began in the twelfth year of the reign of Nero, with anti-taxation protests leading to attacks on Roman citizens by the Jews. The Roman governor, Gessius Florus, responded by plundering the Second Temple, claiming the money was for the Emperor, and the next day launching a raid on the city, arresting numerous senior Jewish figures. This prompted a wider, large-scale rebellion and the Roman military garrison of Judaea was quickly overrun by the rebels.

It took the Romans with all their might four full years to quell the rebellion, marked by the sack of Jerusalem, the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the displacement of its people around the Mediterranean, followed by three years of further mopping-up operations. Most other Roman provinces suffered from extortionate taxation, harsh military rule, severe punishment for anyone who breached the peace. What made the Jews different was the involvement of fierce religious belief which shaded into millenarian visions of a Final Battle and Second Coming of the Promised One. Egypt, Greece, Britain, Spain and other equally exploited provinces had nothing like this.

The rise of Christianity

Obviously nobody alive in the Year One had a clue that it would one day, centuries later, be singled out as the start of a new dispensation on human history. If you’re not a Christian, chances are you still use the Christian system of numbering years, if only for business purposes. If you are a Christian this year marked the start of a completely new epoch of world and human history, one in which Divine Grace entered the human realm and all people were offered the chance of salvation through faith in the risen Christ.

Finley dwells on the fairly well-known textual records of early Christianity, within his realm of Roman studies, for example the famous letters of Pliny the Elder to the emperor Trajan asking for advice on how to deal with the men and women being denounced to him as ‘Christians’.

Returning to borders, Finley points out that this same emperor Trajan conquered ‘Dacia’, roughly modern Transylvania, and embarked on a foolhardy campaign against the Parthians (graveyard of the ambitions of Crassus and Anthony to name but two) but Hadrian, who succeeded him, gave up the Parthian gains and settled the borders of the empire for good. Thus, give or take a few small provinces and the elimination of a few client-kingdoms, such as Judaea, the frontiers established by Augustus in the Year One were not far from being the final, definitive borders of the Empire.

Trade

One of the consistent surprises when reading about pre-modern history is the extent and complexity of pre-modern trade routes. It was one of the big messages of the British Museum’s great Vikings exhibition, showing just how far-flung Viking exploration and trade was. Whether considering the trading networks of ancient China or the early explorations of the Portuguese or the vast extent of the Mongol conquests, the message is always the same: pre-modern trading networks were always more wide-reaching than you would have thought.

Same here: Finley points out that the Romans bought silk from as far afield as China (via middlemen in Chinese Turkestan), and more directly with China and Ceylon. Indo-Roman trading stations existed as far away as Pondicherry. ‘There was a drain of Roman coins to India and further East’. Yet references to India were thin and misleading. In the works of the elegiac poets India is usually just linked as a name alongside Parthia to represent the furtherst ends of the earth.

Similarly, there was trans-Sahara trade, especially for ivory, but almost total ignorance of the African continent below the desert. (p.198)

In a way the northern border was more intriguing. After the catastrophe of the Teutoburg Forest (described in vivid detail by Goldsworthy in his biography of Augustus) Augustus withdrew all legions, merchants and settlers in Germany back south of the Rhine and the Rhine-Danube became de facto the northern border of the empire for the next four centuries.

Despite interacting with them extensively, despite making treaties with chieftains, trading with them, understanding something about their societies, in a sense the Romans never got to grips with the Germans. Finley explains part of this was because the Germans were illiterate so had no texts for the Romans to study; no history, art, no architecture.

Also, the Germans were made up of loose and constantly changing tribal confederations. The Parthians had an emperor, the Armenians a great king and so on: you knew who you were dealing with and what they had to offer and how to bargain. None of this worked with the Germans.

(He makes the interesting point that, in their relative ignorance, the Germans relied on ‘primitive agricultural techniques’ which rapidly exhausted what agricultural land they created by forest clearance, and this was a factor in their constant migrations. That and the periodic arrival of entire peoples from further east, which pushed the nearby Germans over the Rhine, often for safety.)

Lastly, he makes a quick point that despite trade with far-flung places outside the empire, most of the cultural and especially religious innovation came from within the empire.

The great matrix of religion innovation was within the empire, in its eastern regions: Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Asia Minor. And, of course, in the end the triumphant contribution from that area in this period was Christianity. (p.198)

East and West

He concludes with the Big Idea that the whole notion of Western Europe in a sense owes its existence to the Augustan settlement which secured Italy, Spain, France and Britain for Roman rule for centuries to come, bequeathing them a common culture, no matter how far it decayed during the Dark Ages.

The East, with far deeper cultural roots of its own, was not ‘Romanised’ to anything like the same extent, retaining a cultural independence which was expressed, first through the survival of the Byzantine Empire for another 1,000 years, and then through its conquest by another Eastern religion, Islam, tearing the Middle East and North Africa out of the Roman Christian family of nations, setting up a profound geographical and cultural divide which lasts to this day.

Credit

‘The Year One’ was included in a collection of essays by M.I. Finley titled Aspects of Antiquity, published by Penguin books in 1968. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 28, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Christianity, History

Tagged 753 BC, ab urbe condita, AD, Adrian Goldsworthy, Africa, after Christ, Ancient calendars, ancient China, Ancient history, ancient Rome, anno Domini, Anthony, Archelaus, Arminius, Aspects of Antiquity, AUC, Battle of Philippi, BC, before Christ, Bethlehem, Black Sea, British Museum, Byzantine Empire, Catholic church, Ceylon, China, Chinese Turkestan, Christian martyrs, Christianity, Civil Wars, consulship, Crassus, Dacia, Dark Ages, Dionysius Exiguus, Father of the Nation, Feast of the Holy Innocents, First Jewish–Roman War, Gaius, Galilee, Germany, Gessius Florus, gladiators, gospels, Great Jewish Revolt, Herod the Great, history, Holy Innocents' Day, Horace, Imperator, Italy, Jerusalem, Jesus, Jewish War, Joseph and Mary, Joseph ben Matthias, Josephus, Judea, Julia the Elder, Julia the Younger, king of Judea, la mission civilisatrice, Latin, Leges Iuliae, Lucius, Luke's Gospel, M.I. Finley, Maecenas, Matthew's Gospel, Middle East, Mongol, Nero, Octavian, Olympiads, Olympic Games, Ovid, Parthian Empire, Peter Green, Pharisee, Pliny the Elder, Pondicherry, princeps, Princeps of the Youth, provinciae, river Rhine, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman Republic, Second Temple, Second Triumvirate, Teutoburg Forest, The Art of Love, The Flight to Egypt, The Jewish Revolt, The Jewish War, the massacre of the innocents, The Old Testament, the Roman Empire, the Senate, The Year One, Tiberius, Tomis, Trajan, trans-Sahara trade, Viking, Virgil, Western Civilisation, Western Europe, Zealots

Posted by Simon on October 28, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/28/the-year-one-m-i-finley/

The Roman Republic by Michael Crawford (second edition, 1992)

No, not the Michael Crawford, star of the 1970s TV series Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. His version of the Roman Republic would have been hilarious. “Ooooh, Brutus!”

No, this Michael Crawford is the English historian, born in 1939 and still with us, privately educated (like most classicists – St Paul’s and Oxford) who nonetheless takes a solidly socialist view of history. Page two of his preface states that:

I continue to believe that the principal reason for the destruction of Republican government at Rome was the neglect of the legitimate grievances of the population by the governing classes…

The use of ‘continue to believe’ implies that he valiantly persists in his views despite stiff opposition, an impression he goes on to compound by telling us, rather naively and over-earnestly:

…just as I continue to believe that a socialist framework offers the only eventual hope for the survival of our own world. (page vi)

‘Eventual’ is a funny choice of word and, like ‘continue’, hints at an embattled state of mind, of taking a heroic stand against a sea of opponents. (This is also an early indication of Crawford’s often idiosyncratic prose style and oblique way of describing important events.)

Crawford’s earnest socialism might have made sense in 1978 when the first edition of this book was published, but had gone out of style by 1992 when this second edition arrived – a year after the Soviet Union collapsed and the oppressed nations of Eastern Europe were freed from Russian tyranny. Mrs Thatcher had been stabbed in the back by her own MPs in late 1990 but it wasn’t until 1997 that John Major’s useless Conservative government was replaced by Tony Blair’s pazazzy New Labour – which proceeded to destroy forever the kind of socialism Crawford believed in, aligning the left with globalising neo-liberal economics, financial deregulation, public-private partnerships, university tuition fees and the galloping inequality which has brought us to our present happy situation.

Reading Crawford’s little preface makes me sad for all the good people who thought they could make the world a better place and have resoundingly failed. As a result, although the events he describes took place over 2,000 years ago, an air of forlornness hangs over the entire text.

The Roman Republic

It’s not a very good book. Crawford rushes. He squeezes too much information into gangling sentences or long paragraphs. Nothing is gone into in enough detail. Take this example:

Not altogether surprisingly, there were those in Carthage who did not regard the verdict of the First Punic War as final; the creation of an empire in Spain and the acquisition thereby of substantial military and financial resources were followed by Hannibal’s invasion of 218 (the Roman tradition attempted to make the entirely justified attack on Saguntum by Hannibal into the casus belli, in order to salve its conscience over the failure to respond effectively to the appeal by Saguntum to Rome). (p.50)

Bloody long sentence, isn’t it? And useless as factual exposition. With just a little bit more effort Crawford could have given us a separate sentence or two describing the establishment of the Carthaginian empire in Spain by Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, how Hannibal assumed the mantle of command when his father died in 228 BC, and how a series of clashes with the Romans eventually led the Carthaginians to conclude that the only way to solve the ‘Rome problem’ was a direct attack on Italy, which Hannibal launched in 218.

One more sentence could have explained the importance of the battle of Saguntum a lot more clearly. As it is Crawford devotes nearly 40 words to it but somehow manages to not only not explain what happened, but to make it more obscure than if he’d never mentioned it.

Most of Crawford’s book is like this: it contains plenty of facts but a) you can tell that a lot of context and explanation and details are missing, and b) it’s all told arsey-versey, meaning in a ‘wilfully confused and disorderly’ way.

Because I already know the outlines of the story from the other three histories of Rome I’ve read I am able to decipher Crawford’s clipped and contorted references, but it became very tiresome. He gives no sense of Hannibal’s campaign in Italy; he gives no sense of the civil war between Marius and Sulla; he gives no sense of why Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) was such a spectacularly successful general; his account of Caesar’s command in Gaul is so brief as to be non-existent; his coverage of the Catiline conspiracy is risible; his explanation of Cicero’s exile is impenetrable unless you happen to already know the facts and issues; his mentions of Clodius give no sense at all of the street violence unleashed by his gangs or why it led to Pompey being awarded sole power to bring peace to the streets of Rome; and so on and so on. All this is mentioned but nowhere properly explained. As a narrative history of the Roman Republic, this book is rubbish.

The Fontana History of the Ancient World

This volume is the first part of The Fontana History of the Ancient World so maybe Crawford was given a specific period and a tight page limit and this explains the text’s cramped contortions. The book has just 200 pages into which to cram a history which theoretically covered 720 years from the legendary founding of Rome in 753 BC through to the rise of Octavian in the 30s. It also has to contain a timeline, four appendices, half a dozen maps, a list of further reading and 4 separate indices. Maybe that’s why it feels so rushed and superficial. But the lack of space doesn’t explain Crawford’s strange style and often crabbed and obscure way of trying to explain events. That’s just crap.

Schematic

If the book’s weakness is its lack of narrative depth or proper full explanation of events, its strongest parts are where it is most schematic – brief and pithy as a PowerPoint presentation. The chapter headings give a sense of this high-level, schematic approach:

The sources
Italy and Rome
The Roman governing classes
From Italian power to Mediterranean power
The conquest of the East
The consequences of empire – the governing classes
The imperial power
The consequences of empire – the governed
Reform and revolution
Rome and Italy
The end of consensus
The world turned upside down
The embattled oligarchy
The militant dynasts

Good titles, aren’t they? But each of these chapter is too short – 10 pages on the sources, 5 and a half on early Rome’s rise to eminence among the patchwork of Italian tribes, 8 and a half on the ruling class. And the same goes for the four appendices:

The Roman assemblies
The Roman army
Equites
The special commands

They look good but they are 3-and-a-half, one-and-a-half, two-and-a-half and one-and-a-half pages long, respectively. Too short, too allusive to explain anything properly.

Main themes

Crawford tell us his main idea is that the collapse of the Republic was caused by “the neglect of the legitimate grievances of the population by the governing classes” but already in the introduction he undermines his own thesis when he attributes the collapse to two other causes, both of which are more persuasive to me, namely:

1. “The failure to develop communal institutions for the maintenance of order” – when the Senate and the tribunes or popular assemblies fell out there was no institution or way to arbitrate the disputes. Together with the absence of any police force or independent judiciary, this meant whoever ruled the streets or led the biggest army could a) seize power, as in the civil war between Sulla and Marius in the 80s BC or b) more insidiously, create an atmosphere of lawlessness and hooliganism as created by Publius Clodius Pulcher in the 50s.

2. The mad competitiveness between very rich, very ambitious members of what Crawford, throughout the book refers to as the Roman ‘oligarchy’. (Oligarchy is defined as: ‘control by a small group of powerful people.’)

Crawford quotes Aristotle as saying that, so long as it remains united, an oligarchy is impossible to overthrow – but once members fall out with each other, then collapse can come very suddenly. In Crawford’s view, the collapse came about because of:

1. The wealth generated by the hugely expanded Roman empire was unprecedented and put unprecedented power for bribery and corruption into the hands of the super-rich.

2. The long periods for which eminent generals (Marius, Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Caesar) led their men created super-generals, super-leaders, whose rivalries involved entire armies, and, as per point 1, the Republic simply had no way to arbitrate between them (p.25).

In the last forty years of the Republic, the Senate found itself having to award more and more special commands to leading generals (Pompey received most) to allow them to deal with logistical or military problems which were too large, spread out over too long a time period or too far away, for the existing machinery of one-year consuls and regional governors to handle.

Thus Pompey was given a special command to deal with the ongoing pirate problem in 67, immediately followed by a special command to deal with the unending war against Mithridates VI in Asia. The growing reliance on special commands was symptomatic of how the institutions of the republic couldn’t cope with the challenge of running an empire.

Who was the Roman oligarchy?

So who were the “governing classes” which Crawford refers to in his introduction? Chapter 2 gives a pithy overview.

Soon after the overthrow of the monarchy in about 510 BC, the Roman ruling class decided to ensure they were never again ruled by the caprices of one man, so they took two steps:

1. they divided executive power between two officials, the consuls and

2. they had them elected, and for one year only – enough time to carry out official duties and for one military campaign season, then their time was up and someone else took over

Those seeking election generally had to have held more junior positions in what developed into a ladder or stepping stones of official positions. These offices of ‘magistracies’ evolved over the years but, given the human tendency to multiply bureaucracies, remained surprisingly few.

They were, in rising order of responsibility, the posts of quaestor, aedile and praetor. These positions were referred to collectively as the magistracies. This sequence of public offices was called the cursus honorum. Candidates for the magistracies had to canvas the people at annual hustings. They were elected by all adult males who had property enough to be included in the regular census carried out for this purpose which had originally been established to assign men to appropriate ranks in the citizen army.

Hence another elected post, that of censor, responsible for keeping the list of citizens a) eligible to vote and b) assigned to the appropriate rank in the army, up to date.

To be eligible to join the army a citizen needed to be a member of the assidui i.e. to achieve a basic property qualification (p.97). The assidui were divided into five classis or ranks, according to their assets, and it was the job of the censors to keep this list of citizens, their property and their ranking up to date.

The senate consisted of all the men who had previously held office as a magistrate. Senate derives from the Latin word senex which simply means old man, on the assumption that mature men who had held office gave good advice.

The single most important thing to grasp about Roman politics is that the senate did not make laws. It was a solely advisory body – although it arrogated to itself certain policies, specifically financial policy and military strategy. Anybody intending to create legislation was expected to consult the senate, which could and did hold extensive debates for and against legislation, suggesting amendments, improvements or that laws be rejected. But the senate didn’t actually pass the laws. It relied on the popular assemblies to propose and vote on actual laws.

Members of the same small group of families held magistracies and eminent positions in the state for hundreds of years. These were the patricians who monopolised the important magistracies and the various religious offices and half a dozen priesthoods (which were also elected).

The patricians distinguished themselves from the plebs or plebeians, who supposedly came from more recent, less ancient and venerable families. But within a century or so of the overthrow of the kings the plebs agitated to have a say for themselves, campaigns which eventually led to the creation of an assembly where the plebs could discuss their issues, the concilium plebis, and the creation of the post of tribune of the plebs. The tribune’s original function was to protect citizens from arbitrary actions by the (mostly patrician) magistrates. Over the years the number and powers of the tribunes slowly expanded.

In 342 BC the plebs broke through a glass ceiling and won the legal right to stand for the consulship alongside patricians. The consequence was the growth of a mixed patrician-plebeian nobility because, by the 300s, the leading plebeian families were not at all common working people but had developed into a class of very wealthy families in their own right (‘the plebeian leadership was rich and ambitious’, p.28).

This mixed patrician-plebeian nobility is what Crawford means when he (frequently) refers to the ‘oligarchy’ (‘control by a small group of powerful people.’)

The history of the Roman republic is the history of the fierce rivalry between a relatively small number of men at the core of this patrician-plebeian oligarchy, as they were forced to express it through the channels of a) election to a magistracy b) success as a military commander c) success as governor of an overseas province.

It was a complicated and sensitive mechanism which, by its last century, was riddled with bribery and corruption and, as mentioned above, fierce competition between its members for power and status which repeatedly spilled over into street violence. In the final 50 years it escalated into armed rebellion and civil war between Roman legions loyal to rival Strong Men.

Roman flexibility

Although they went on about their legends and traditions, one of the most notable things about the Roman state and culture was their flexibility.

Constitutional flexibility As provinces were acquired and something like an empire came into being, the Roman oligarchy expanded the number of magistracies sitting under the consulship, increasing the number of quaestors and praetors i.e. they were flexible in adapting their constitution.

Cultural flexibility From about 200 BC onwards the Roman elite took an increasing interest in Greek art, architecture, literature and philosophy, and frankly copied it (as in the plays of Plautus and Terence), and slowly developed their own versions and distinct styles.

Citizen flexibility But both these aspects rested on the ancient Roman custom of incorporating peoples into their state. Thus the conquest of the many tribes of Italy by one city state didn’t result in their miserable subjugation, but by the carefully calibrated award of Roman citizenship to tribes and communities around the country. When Rome went on to conquer foreign lands (starting with Sicily in the 240s) she made no demands that the population change their religion, culture or laws – they simply had to offer up young men for the Roman army (p.74).

The openness of Rome to outsiders was one of the sources of her strength in Italy (p.78)

It was this ability to incorporate foreign lands, foreign peoples, the best of foreign cultures and even their gods and religions, which underpinned a thousand years of success.

The impact of empire on the Roman ruling class

It’s worth making the minor point that all the historians talk about Rome having an ’empire’ well before the end of the Republican period and before they had actual emperors. In the talismanic year 146 BC the Romans crushed Carthage in the west and Corinth in the East, thus confirming their hegemony over the Mediterranean. The defeat of Carthage handed over the latter’s territories in north Africa and Spain to Rome, and after Rome defeated the Achaean League in 146 BC she used Greece as a jumping off point for greater involvement in ‘Asia’ (modern day Turkey) and across the sea in Egypt.

An empire in fact well before it became an empire in name.

Extreme wealth

Crawford’s thesis is simple: the phenomenal wealth which could be extracted from these overseas territories (‘generals and governors abroad had almost limitless opportunities for illegitimate enrichment’, p.74), plus the prestige attached to military success and the public triumphs awarded to victorious generals, led to increasing disparities among the ruling elite: some became phenomenally rich and successful, others less so.

The enormous power wielded by Roman magistrates operating far from senatorial oversight led to grave abuses; the wealth acquired from office by some members of the oligarchy separated them spectacularly from the rest and enabled them to bribe their own way and that of other members of their family to further office. (p.84)

The conquest of the Greek East from 200 BC onwards provided ready access to Greek artistic and intellectual skills and techniques and to wealth on a staggering scale. (p.85)

He quotes the Roman saying that a provincial governor needed to screw not one but three fortunes out of his unfortunate subjects: one to repay the money he borrowed to pay his election expenses; one to bribe the jury at the trial for corruption he would inevitably face when he got back to Rome; and the third one for the traditional reason – to have the wherewithal to fund the conspicuously rich lifestyle demanded by his class (p.171), a particularly conspicuous example being the successful general Lucius Licinius Lucullus. By the 60s:

Provincial government not only provided men with wealth and connections on a scale unimagined a generation earlier; the great commands placed in their hands for a time almost regal power and led to their being showered with symbolic honours appropriate to that power. Here again Pompeius surpassed all his predecessors. (p.176)

So, as the first century BC progressed, at the very top of the Roman oligarchy, competition for the consulship, for governorship of a province or generalship of an army overseas, became increasingly fierce and bitter because the rewards became increasingly mind-boggling.

It was bitter rivalry about who would lead the Roman military campaign against Mithridates VI of Pontus in modern-day Turkey, which precipitated the civil war between Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla starting in 88 BC. It was failure to agree a mechanism whereby Caesar could lay down command of his army in Gaul and transition to being a consul in 49 which led to the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. It was the failure of the centuries-old institutions of the Republic to control and mediate the rivalry between these super-powerful men, and then between Octavian and Mark Antony after Caesar’s assassination, which led, after repeated collapses, to its complete replacement by the rule of one strong man.

Seen in this light, the domestic policies of the oligarchy throughout the 2nd century and into the 1st century, consisted of the oligarchy’s attempts to moderate and police itself, to hold this power in check. It had created a machine of awesome power which it could no longer control.

The decade 59 to 49 saw competition between the leading members of the oligarchy reach such an intensity that it destroyed the framework in which competition operated or had meaning. It burst out as the naked use of force. Might could only be met with might and could only lead to the triumph of one man only, Octavian.

The land problem

This much is maybe obvious. Crawford’s left-wing perspective comes out in his insistence that the ‘people’ played a leading role in the process. He claims they did this in two inter-related ways. First, was the land problem. In a nutshell, in the last 150 years of the republic the ordinary peasant farmer was driven off the land in ever-increasing numbers. The richest patricians relentlessly bought up land, exploiting the harsh money-lending and debt laws which penalised ordinary farmers.

This explains why there were so many attempts to redistribute land and to enact some form of debt relief over those 150 years. Take C. Laelius’s proposal in 140 that land be redistributed to the needy in order to raise them up to the property qualification required by recruitment into the army, thereby improving it, (p.91). Or Tiberius Gracchus’s proposals for redistributing land from the wealthy to the landless in 133. Crawford devotes a chapter to describing in detail the process of land appropriation by the rich and the various attempts by reformers to stem the tide (pages 94 to 106).

They mostly failed and the net result was the creation of huge estates (which came to be called latifundia) owned by very rich landowners, and the driving of hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers off the land and into the towns, where they created shanty towns and formed the mobs susceptible to popular rabble rousers.

Thus the rise of the super-rich not only destabilised their own class, the oligarchy, but indirectly contributed to the rise of the mob mentality which increasingly dominated Roman politics in the last 50 years of the republic.

The lynching of Tiberius Gracchus

Crawford goes along with all the other historians I’ve read who say that the public lynching of the reformer Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC marked a turning point because for the first time laws, justice and deference gave way to brute violence. His younger brother was similarly massacred along with hundreds of his followers a decade later, but it was really the long and bitter Social War of the 90s which led directly into the civil war of the 80s, and to the appalling politically motivated murders commissioned by both Marius and Sulla, which made politicised street violence an accepted event.

A generation later, the street violence between the gangs led by Clodius and Milo destabilised politics throughout the 50s. And it was Mark Antony’s speech in the forum the day after Caesar’s assassination, displaying Caesar’s body and reading out his will, which roused the mob to a fury and to go off and torch the houses of the conspirators, thus driving them to flee from Rome, putting them on the back foot and guaranteeing that Antony and his group in the oligarchy would triumph.

The point is these successive outbreaks of constitutional collapse were partly enabled by the growth of a large class of urban proletariat, mobs of the unemployed or underemployed, former farmers driven off their land, embittered and ready for anything. It explains the appeal of Catalina’s vague promises to overthrow the entire state and start again to large numbers of the urban poor.

And we know from Cicero’s letters that even Octavian, who was to be the last man standing at the end of this series of ruinous civil wars, went out of his way to make himself liked by the mob.

In a sentence: the population displaced from the land and herded into the cities provided the raw material of aggrieved proles which the unprecedentedly powerful and homicidally competitive oligarchs were able to manipulate for their advantage.

Slavery

There was a third element: slavery. As conquest followed conquest in the 2nd century, as entire cities and peoples were conquered and some (not all) sold into slavery, there developed a tidal wave of slavery. This had two effects: one was that the economy didn’t need the peasant farmer any more; slaves could farm huge latifundia virtually for free. Second was a ratcheting up of the luxury living of the urban rich, and even the well-off middle classes, once their houses became full of slaves who did all kinds of work and services for free. The Roman historian Appian wrote:

‘So the powerful became very rich and slaves spread all over Italy.’ (quoted on page 102)

There was probably a third effect as well, which was the slave trade itself, which Crawford says really got going in the 140s i.e after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth. Easy to overlook the slaves and the simple fact that they created a vast amount of economic value for little overhead. The trade made slave traders very rich, but transformed the lives of Roman citizens of all but the lowest classes. (p.102).

‘When the Romans became rich after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth they used enormous numbers of slaves…’ (Roman historian Strabo quoted on page 131)

The growing use of slaves led to three slave wars or risings, in 135 to 132, 104 to 100, and 73 to 71. The Greek island of Delos became the centre of the slave trade in the eastern Mediterranean . It was said it could receive, sell and dispatch tens of thousands of slaves every day! (p.131).

Conclusion

This is a poor book, which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Its take-home message is straightforward: it is bad, sometimes fatal, to the peace and viability of a society to let some of its members become disproportionately rich or powerful. Extreme wealth not only corrupts individuals but destabilises entire societies. A largely ignored message still relevant to us inhabitants of the ‘advanced’ economies of the West.

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by Simon on July 22, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Slavery

Tagged Achaean League, aedile, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Appian, Aristotle, assidui, Caesar, Catiline Conspiracy, censor, classics, Clodius, Concilium Plebis, consulship, Corinth, cursus honorum, Delos, Eastern Europe, equites, financial deregulation, First Punic War, Fontana History of the Ancient World, Gaius Marius, Gallic Wars, Gaul, Gnaeus Pompeius, Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal, history, John Major, Julius Caesar, land reform, latifundia, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, Lucullus, magistracies, Marius, Mediterranean, Michael Crawford, Milo, Mithridates VI, Mithridates VI of Pontus, Mrs Thatcher, neo-liberal economics, New Labour, North Africa, Octavian, oligarchy, patrician-plebeian oligarchy, patricians, Plautus, plebeians, plebs, Pompey, praetor, Publius Clodius Pulcher, quaestor, Roman army, Roman Empire, Roman history, Roman Republic, Saguntum, Senate, senex, Sicily, Slavery, Social War, socialism, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Soviet Union, Spain, special commands, Strabo, Sulla, Terence, The Roman Republic, Tiberius Gracchus, Tony Blair, tribune of the plebs, university tuition fees, urban proletariat

Posted by Simon on July 22, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/the-roman-republic-michael-crawford/

Plutarch’s life of Pompey

Pompey always maintained that simplicity in his habits which cost him no great effort; for he was naturally temperate and orderly in his desires. (18)

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106 to 48 BC)

This is one of the longest lives, with 80 chapters. Pompey the Great was a boy wonder general, who racked up a series of military victories, both in Rome’s civil wars and against external enemies. He was awarded unprecedented military power to fight the pirates and then prosecute the war in Parthia in the 60s BC, with the result that a growing number of critics began to think him a threat to the state.

In 60 BC Pompey entered into an uneasy alliance with the two other most powerful men in Rome, Julius Caesar (who had himself been awarded extraordinary and extended powers to fight his long war in Gaul) and Marcus Crassus (the richest man in Rome) in order to bribe and strong-arm their way to successive consulships and continually renewed generalships. It was called the triumvirate.

In the later 50s the triumvirate collapsed because a) Crassus was killed on campaign in Parthia and b) Caesar’s beloved daughter, Julia, who he had given to Pompey, died young, thus breaking the family tie between them. It left Pompey and Caesar as the two most powerful men in the state, both with devoted armies behind them, eyeing each other nervously. When his political opponents in Rome tried to end Caesar’s command in Gaul he marched with his army into Italy in 49 BC, triggering a civil war against Pompey and the army of Italy, which lasted from 49 to 45, ending with complete victory for Caesar. But by this stage Pompey was already dead, having been murdered in Egypt, fleeing from a military defeat in Greece, at which point the Pompey part of the story ends.

The life

(1) Contrasts the extreme unpopularity of the father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo (135 to 87), hated by his soldiers for his greed and cruelty, with the tremendous popularity of the son. Plutarch says the son was persuasive, trustworthy and tactful. Now all of this contrasts strongly with the portrait of Pompey given in the Life of Crassus, where he is made to be tactless, clumsy and anti-social. This raises the strong possibility that the characters Plutarch paints are not historically accurate or even consistent across his own biographies, but that Plutarch changes and rearranges them in the context of each life to make each life more dramatic. Artistic licence. Plutarch did warn us hat he feels more like a painter than a historian.

(2) He had a boyish youthful grace which people found attractive leading many to nickname him Alexander, after the boy wonder conqueror. Many rumours of his love affairs, for example the story of Flora the old courtesan who boasted that she never left his company without bitemarks.

(3) How young Pompey quelled an attempt by mutinous troops to murder his father and then talked round the troops.

(4) On his father’s death in 87 Pompey was put on trial for misappropriation of public funds but defended himself ably and was acquitted, in fact the judge in the case, Antistius, offered him his daughter in marriage.

(5) Plutarch associates Pompey directly with Cinna‘s death, saying that Pompey went into hiding but people thought Cinna had ordered him killed, so soldiers rose up against Cinna and a centurion pursued and killed him. 84 BC. By contrast the history books say Cinna was murdered by his own troops who mutinied rather than be sent across the Adriatic to fight Sulla in Greece.

(6) Gnaeus Papirius Carbo replaced Cinna as ruler of Rome, and Pompey, not yet 23, raised an army against him in the provinces and marched to Rome to support Sulla.

(7) Pompey defeated in quick succession the forces of Carinas, Cloelius, and Brutus, then persuaded the army of Scipio the consul to come over to him, then defeated a force sent by Carbo himself. Wunderkind.

(8) When Sulla’s army approaches Pompey ensures his looks smart and Sulla greets him at Imperator and later showed great marks of respect. When Sulla wanted to send Pompey to Gaul to help Metellus, Pompey very tactfully said he didn’t want to tread on the older man’s toes but would go if requested. He was requested, he did go and performed great feats.

(9) Sulla realised how valuable Pompey was and, once he was established in power in Rome (82 BC) he and his wife Metella prevail on the young man to divorce Antistia and marry Aemilia, the step-daughter of Sulla, even though she was pregnant with another man’s child. Political marriages. [In the same spirit Sulla tried to make Julius Caesar part with his wife, but Caesar refused and was so scared of reprisals that he went into hiding.] This was cruel on Antistia whose father had been murdered by Marius’s son, Marcus, for being a partisan of Pompey’s and whose mother had killed herself in response. Anyway, fate is fate, and Amelia had barely been installed in Pompey’s house before she died giving birth to the other man’s child.

(10) Once Sulla is secure in power in Rome, Pompey was charged with mopping up outstanding noble survivors. He was harshly judged for his delaying treatment of Carbo, 4 times consul, and but dealt mercifully with Himera and Sthenis. Perpenna was occupying Sicily until Pompey headed that way, at which he abandoned it and headed for Spain (where he was to become a grudging lieutenant to that other Marian exile, Sertorius).

(11) Sulla sends Pompey to Libya to fight Domitius Ahenobarbus. Pompey lands with a large force and defeats Domitius in a rainstorm. He arranges treaties with the cities of Libya and then invades into Numidia. It is said all this took him just 40 days and he was only 24 years old.

(12) Back at his base in Utica Pompey receives a letter from Sulla telling him to send his legions back to Italy which upsets Pompey, but his army threaten to mutiny in order to stay with him. When Pompey returns to Rome the people flock out to see him, who many are already calling Magnus or ‘the Great’ and Sulla thinks it politic to also acclaim Pompey as the great. According to Plutarch Pompey himself was one of the last to use this agnomen.

(14) Pompey asks for a triumph but Sulla refuses, saying he hasn’t even been a praetor yet let alone a consul. This was the context of Pompey allegedly muttering that more people worship the rising than the setting sun which, when he heard it, Sulla was so impressed by Pompey’s sheer cheek that he changed his mind and let Pompey have his triumph (probably in 81 BC). Pompey could easily have been elected to the Senate but it didn’t interest him so he didn’t try.

(15) Sulla resented Pompey’s popularity with the people but rarely let it show. He did, though, remark when Pompey put his name behind Lepidus‘s campaign to be elected consul in 78 BC, that Pompey had ensured that the worst man alive (Lepidus) secured more votes than the best (Catulus). Later that year Sulla died

(16) Lepidus, elected consul in 78, demanded a second consulship for the following year and, when it was refused, raised an army along with the sons of the old Marian cause. Pompey, as so often, was tasked with quelling the rebellion, defeated Lepidus at Cosa and Lepidus withdrew into Sardinia where he died the same year. Many of his supporters escaped to Spain where they joined the Marian rebel, Sertorius.

(17) Having defeated Lepidus, Pompey refused to disband his army but kept it near Rome. Many deprecated this, but it meant he was ready when the Senate ordered him to Spain to deal with the Marian rebel Sertorius. Pompey took over from Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius who was old and, to general surprise, had become addicted to luxury. This was never a problem for Pompey who was naturally moderate in all things.

(18) Pompey’s arrival in Spain rejuvenated the Roman troops. He wins a victory near Valentia.

(19) The big but inconclusive battle at the river Sucro in which he is wounded in the hand. Pompey’s respect for Metellus. The success of Sertorius’s hit and run guerrilla tactics.

(20) In 74, running low on money, Pompey wrote a famous letter to the Senate asking for more resources or saying he’d be forced to march home. LucullusPlutarch’s life of Lucullus was consul and did everything he could to get the money assigned. This was for personal reasons because he wanted to be assigned command of the army heading East to fight King Mithridates VI of Pontus (the region along the south coast of the Black sea), and didn’t want Pompey to come home and snaffle this very desirable gig.

In 73 Sertorius was murdered at a dinner party by his resentful lieutenant Perpenna. Perpenna then took to the field against Pompey but had none of his victim’s agility and strategy. Pompey engaged the rebels in plain battle and slaughtered them. Perpenna and other Roman nobles were brought before him, and Pompey had them all executed.

There’s a story that Perpenna offered Pompey Sertorius’s correspondence with lots of leading figures in Rome who had been corresponding with him about overthrowing Sulla in the popular cause – but Pompey didn’t want to revive the civil war which was only just over and so burned the correspondence unread.

(21) Pompey went on to arrange peace in Spain, before returning to Italy in 71. He arrived at the height of the Spartacus rebellion, to the great irritation of Crassus who wanted to finish it off before Pompey took the credit. So Crassus hurried up and arranged a final set piece battle with Spartacus, at which he massacred the insurgents. Yet Pompey still managed to get credit because about 5,000 escaped from the main battle and Pompey engaged with them and slaughtered them. Then wrote a letter to the Senate saying Crassus certainly defeated Spartacus in battle but he, Pompey, scotched the cause once and for all.

There was widespread fear that, not disbanding his army and with so many successes, Pompey might turn into another Sulla. But he didn’t and he went out of his way to ingratiate himself with the people, for example supporting the law to have the powers which Sulla had taken away from the people’s tribunes restored to them.

(22) His influence is indicated by the way that Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, only considered putting himself forward for consul if Pompey would back him, which he did. Both men were elected consuls in 70 BC. The story of Pompey appearing in person before the two censors to resign his military command.

(23) However, the pair spent a lot of their consul year at daggers drawn. As the year of their joint office neared its end a man climbed on the public platform they were sharing and said Jupiter had appeared in a dream and told him the consuls mustn’t lay down their office till they’d become friends again. So Crassus stepped forward, took Pompey’s hand and praised him to the crowd. Having laid down his office, Pompey was seen less and less in public, and then only surrounded by a crowd to boost his sense of magnificence.

(24) Pirates A digression giving background on the rise of the pirates around the Mediterranean – caused in part because the Romans are devoting their energies to civil wars – till the pirates were said to have 1,000 ships and to have captured 400 cities. Their flaunting their power, wearing fine clothes and decorated ships was offensive. But in more practical terms the pirate plague was driving up prices and causing discontent.

(25) In 67 the tribune Aulus Gabinius proposed a law giving Pompey extraordinary power to crush the pirates, which led to impassioned speeches for and against in the Senate. But it was a very popular idea with the people.

(26) Pompey was awarded the commission divided the Mediterranean into quadrants which he assigned to subordinates tasked with sweeping them clean. In an astonishing 40 days he had routed the pirates and ended the problem in the western Med.

(27) In Rome the consul Piso conspired against Pompey, trying to limit the funding of the project and releasing ship’s crews early, so Pompey interrupted his campaign to anchor at Brindisi, march to Rome and sort things out.

Then he returned to sea, sailing East, with a stopover at Athens. Pompey closed in on the pirates’ bases in Cilicia but then amazed everyone by capturing but then setting free the pirates. He treated all of them leniently.

(28) Finally he tackles the hard core pirates at a headland off Cilicia. Pompey drove them off their boats and into a fortress which he besieged till the pirates, starving, surrendered. In less than 3 months the entire pirate problem had been sorted. He had captured 20,000 prisoners. Rather than punish them, though, Pompey very wisely resettled the pirates and their families in Greece and Asia Minor, in cities which he then granted extra land, figuring that good example, honest work and opportunity would tame them.

(29) Pompey’s dispute with Metellus (relative of the Metellus he fought alongside in Spain) who was fighting the pirates in Crete but whose authority Pompey undermined, taking the side of the pirates. Much criticism.

(30) With the end of the pirate campaign in 66 BC, one of the tribunes of the plebs, Manilius, proposes a law giving Pompey extraordinary power in the East to prosecute the war against Mithridates, taking command away from Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Debate, opposition from the nobles, but passed by the people. Pompey pretends to be vexed by the endless tasks he is given but was in reality pleased.

(31) So Pompey rallies his legions and sails for Asia Minor. Here he marches through the land, leaving nothing undisturbed that Lucullus had done. Eventually the two meet, with their armies, in Galatia. Both sets of lictors have put wreaths on their fasces but after a weary march Pompey’s are faded, so Lucullus’s lictors put their fresh wreaths on Pompey’s lictors’ fasces – which was remembered long afterwards as symbolising how Pompey had come to steal glory from Lucullus who had done all the hard work.

He’s referring to the way Pompey had a track record of arriving at the end of military campaigns and stealing the glory from, for example, Metellus in Spain and Crassus against Spartacus. Lucullus apparently compared Pompey to a lazy carrion-bird, that alights on bodies that others had killed and mocks him for having won a triumph (in 71 BC) for appearing at the end of the 3 year war against Spartacus and wiping out a relatively small number of stragglers. Right place, right time.

The two successful generals try to be civil, but behind each other’s backs, Pompey criticises Lucullus for his greed and looting and Lucullus criticises Pompey for his lust for power.

(32) Pompey’s campaign against Mithridates who shows the same ability to endlessly escape from battles and traps as he did against Lucullus. A battle fought by moonlight where the Romans massacre 10,000 Parthians.

(33) Pompey discovers young Tigranes of Armenia is in rebellion against his father, Tigranes king of kings, so allies and marches with him. The elder Tigranes comes to submit and is going to obeise himself when Pompey raises him up, sits him at his side, says he can retain his kingship and remaining provinces but a) those won by Lucullus will become Roman b) he must pay an indemnity of 6,000 talents, to which Tigranes agrees. Young Tigranes violently disagrees, insults Pompey and is put in chains. Phraates, king of the Parthians, sends an embassy suggesting the Euphrates should be the border between Roman territory and Parthian, and Pompey agrees.

(34) Pompey marches north towards and the Caucasus in search of Mithridates, and is attacked by native peoples, first the Albanians then the Iberians, both of which he thrashes.

(35) Mithridates had headed west and Pompey wanted to follow him but heard that the Albanians had rebelled again so crossed the river Cyrnus with difficulty, then marches across dry land carrying 10,000 waterskins and then crushed the Albanian army consisting of 60,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry. As always, with numbers, a healthy dose of scepticism. Rumour that the Amazons fought with the Albanians but no women’s bodies were found. Note on the location and customs of the Amazons who are said to live in the Caucasus.

(36) Pompey sets off for Hyrcania but is driven back by the wild snakes. The kings of the Elymaeans and the Medes sent ambassadors to him, and he wrote them a friendly answer. The Parthian king had burst into Gordyene and was plundering the subjects of Tigranes so Pompey he sent an armed force under Afranius.

Pompey is sent all the concubines of Mithridates but doesn’t keep them, sending them back to their homes. Folk tale of one of the concubines, Stratonice, who was daughter to a very poor old man. When Mithridates took her as a concubine the old man woke up to find his house overflowing with treasure and servants. This Stratonice had been left in charge of one of Mithridates’ fortresses but handed it over to Pompey who, chastely, handed them over to the questors to be sent back to Rome.

(37) In the castle of Caenum Pompey comes across a cache of Mithridates’ correspondence showing, among other things, the people he’d had poisoned, including one of his own sons.

(38) While Mithridates was still alive and at large with a big force, Pompey did what he’d criticised Lucullus for doing and began to administer his provinces, having meetings with kings, issuing edicts and so on.

In his campaigns Pompey had reached some of the limits of the known world. In Spain he had reached the Atlantic (which the ancients thought was the Great Ocean surrounding one unified land mass). In North Africa he had also marched as far as the Outer Sea. In the East he had nearly reached Hyrcania. Now he wanted to march south through Arabia to the Red Sea.

(39) Pompey ordered a blockade of Mithridates in his base in the Bosporus (not the Bosphorus by modern Istanbul, but the area round the Crimea in the north Black Sea) and set off south. He annexed Syria for Rome and then Judaea, and made a prisoner of Aristobulus the king. He acted more and more like a mighty sovereign, dispensing justice to lower kings. He was asked to arbitrate a dispute between the kings of Parthia and Armenia. However many of his associates and lieutenants were grasping and corrupt.

(40) A notable hanger-on of Pompey’s was the Greek would-be philosopher Demetrius, who was impertinent and greedy. He used the treasure he looted in the East to buy big properties in Rome including the ‘gardens of Demetrius’. By contrast Pompey always lived in a very modest house.

(41) Pompey was on his way to deal with the king of Petra when messengers arrive bearing the news that Mithridates is finally dead. He killed himself after the revolt of his son, Pharnaces in 63 BC.

Locked up by his son, Pharnaces, Mithridates has his two young daughters poisoned then asks his bodyguard Bituitus to kill him.

The new king, Pharnaces, writes to Pompey saying he wants peace and sends the corpses of his father and entourage. Pompey is amazed at the splendour of the dead king’s accoutrements, most of which are subsequently stolen.

(42) Pompey winds up his affairs in Asia Minor then heads back to Rome in what turns into a kind of triumphal tour, stopping to be publicly praised in Mytilene, Rhodes and Athens. As he gets closer to Italy he takes more serious the rumours that his wife, Mucia, had been living a wild and debauched life, and so divorced her, winning the enmity of her family.

(43) It’s 63 BC. There is much paranoia in Rome that Pompey is returning to conquer the city as Sulla had done in 82. Crassus flees the city with his children. But on arriving at Brundisium Pompey dismissed his army, telling them to return to their homes, and continued to Rome accompanied only by close friends and entourage. This won him huge popularity and crowds turned out to cheer him in every town. He really was a golden boy (well man – aged 43).

(44) A general was not supposed to enter Rome until his triumph. Pompey asked for a dispensation to help the campaign for consul of M. Pupius Piso but Cato argued against it and it was blocked. Pompey admired Cato and suggested he marry one of Cato’s nieces and have his son marry the other one, but Cato saw through this form of bribery and refused. Nonetheless Pompey spent a fortune bribing the voters to elect Afranius consul in 60.

(45) September 61, Pompey’s awesome triumph which took 2 days. Not only was it awesome in terms of territory conquered, kings defeated and revenue brought in but Pompey’s three triumphs had been one in Africa, one in Europe and one in Asia, as if he had conquered the whole world.

(46) If he had died at this point, Pompey would have gone down as one of the greatest generals in history. Instead he was to get mixed up in politics and the immense reputation he had won would in the end go to empower his rival Julius Caesar.

Lucullus and Cato band against Pompey and, in response, Pompey found himself allying with an unpleasant character, Publius Clodius Pulcher, who dragged his name into the mud and involved him in the shameful exile of Cicero (in 58).

(47) Caesar had returned from Gaul and, seeing that Crassus and Pompey were opponents and he couldn’t ally with one without alienating the other, had the bright idea of allying with both and persuading them to join in a coalition, the triumvirate, to promote all their interests, established at secret meetings in 60. Caesar was elected consul for 59. In the same year to everyone’s surprise Pompey now married Julius Caesar’s young daughter, Julia.

(48) Pompey now organises street gangs to terrorise the opponents of his plan to get land made available for his army veterans. His strongest opponent is Cato’s son-in-law, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. A basket of dung is emptied over his head, his lictors are beaten up. The people are cowed into passing Pompey’s law. In 59 Publius Vatinius as tribune of the plebs proposed the lex Vatinia, which granted Caesar Cisalpine Gaul and IIlyricum for five years. At the instigation of Pompey and Piso the Senate added the province of Transalpine Gaul. The consuls for the following year were to be Piso, the father-in‑law of Caesar, and Gabinius, the most extravagant of Pompey’s flatterers. That is how the triumvirate administered their power.

Of their opponents Bibulus hid in his villa, Lucullus retired from public life altogether but Cato continued haranguing them in the Senate. In fact Pompey was soon seduced by his wife into retiring into private life. Caesar had disappeared off to Gaul so the political agenda was driven by Piso who got Cicero driven into exile (58) and then had Cato sent as governor to Cyprus. (Neither of these events are described in any detail, maybe because they’re dealt with in the respective lives.)

(49) Clodius then turned his scurrilous abuse against Pompey who regretted his acquiescence in Cicero’s exile. When Cicero was recalled he helped steer the passage of a corn law which placed Pompey in absolute control of Rome’s harbours, trading-places, distributions of crops — in a word, navigation and agriculture. Pompey really was the go-to guy to get things fixed.

(50) A brief note on Pompey’s success in sailing to Sicily, Sardinia and Africa to get grain. As usual Plutarch isn’t at all interested in the details but tells an improving story about Pompey’s words of encouragement to the captain of the fleet when a big storm arises as they’re about to set sail.

(51) Plutarch explains how Caesar’s time in Gaul was spent not only fighting the various tribes but in readying his army for civil strife, and in continually sending money and treasure back to Rome to bribe officials and the people to his side. Witness the conference he called at Luca in 66 to bolster the triumvirate which was attended by Pompey, Crassus, 200 men of senatorial rank and 120 proconsuls and praetors. The deal struck was that Caesar would send back enough soldiers to ensure the election of Crassus and Pompey as consuls for the following year on condition they passed a law getting Caesar’s command in Gaul extended.

(52) Cato, now back in Rome, encouraged his brother-in-law Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus to stand for the consulship of 55 but, true to the triumvirate pact, Pompey organised a gang to attack him and his entourage in the forum, killing his torchbearer and wounding Cato himself as he went to protect Domitius. It’s like the street fighting in Renaissance Italy or, more grimly, in Weimar Germany.

At the expiry of his consulship Crassus set off to be governor of Syria with authority over the entire East. Meanwhile Pompey opened his vast and splendid circus with a series of spectaculars, the one which stuck in everyone’s minds being a battle against elephants which horrified the spectators (including Cicero who records it in a letter).

(53) Pompey was criticised for his uxoriousness i.e. retiring to his villa to enjoy life with his young wife. She was devoted to him, maybe for the simple reason that among Roman men he was remarkably faithful. He was also handsome and had charming manners. Her devotion is demonstrated by the occasion on which a fight broke out in the forum and his toga was splashed with blood. His servants carried it home to be cleaned but when Julia saw it she fainted and miscarried. This sounds like an idealised folk story. Because for the purposes of the narrative she quickly has to be gotten pregnant again and nine months later, miscarry and die (in 54 BC). Pompey was distraught and wanted her buried at a family villa but the people insisted she was buried in the Campus Martius.

Plutarch then skips very quickly over Crassus’s defeat and death in Parthia (presumably because it’s dealt with at such massive length in his life of Crassus) skipping on to the main point which is that these 2 events marked the end of the triumvirate and the unravelling of the working relationship between Caesar and Pompey. He drops into graceful moralising:

So slight a thing is fortune when compared with human nature; for she cannot satisfy its desires, since all that extent of empire and magnitude of wide-stretching domain could not suffice for two men. They had heard and read that the gods “divided the universe into three parts, and each got his share of power” and yet they did not think the Roman dominion enough for themselves, who were but two. (53)

Beginning the slide into 25 years of civil war.

(54) The issue almost immediately was whether Caesar would lay down his command. Pompey made speeches pointing out how easily he had given up his command after returning from the East. Pompey tried to get his supporters into positions of power but discovered that Caesar had been quietly doing this for some time. Government became gridlocked and as soon as the following year, 53, a tribune suggested Pompey be made dictator. Elections of consuls stalled in 52 and even opponents such as Cato suggested Pompey be made sole consul, as being better than anarchy.

Pompey approached Cato in a private capacity to give advice, but Cato was typically priggish and said he would continue speaking his mind.

(55) Pompey marries Cornelia, widow of Publius Crassus, the son of Crassus who perished along with his father in Parthia. Critics thought it bad taste to be frolicking with garlands at a time of public crisis. He supervised public life effectively, placing soldiers at trials so they could continue without the usual barracking and intimidation. He was blamed for showing partiality in some trials but overall did a good job and was awarded governorship of his provinces for another five years.

(56) Caesar’s supporters said that he, too, deserved reward, and should have his command in Gaul extended. The suggestion was made that he should be allowed to stand for the consulship in his absence. Conservatives like Cato strongly objected, saying he should relinquish his command and return as an ordinary citizen to canvas.

(57) Pompey had a serious illness at Naples. When he recovered there was widespread rejoicing in that city and then in all the towns he passed through on his way back to Rome. Plutarch says this public support gave him a misleading sense of his own power. Back when the triumvirate was formed Pompey had sent two of the legions assigned to him to Gaul with Caesar. Now he asked for them back and they came commanded by Appius who made slighting comments about Caesar’s abilities. Pompey was fooled into thinking he had widespread support and military strength in Italy.

(58) Caesar based himself near to the border with Italy and intervened extensively in Roman politics, in particular bribing key officials in his favour and sending large blocs of soldiers to swing elections in his favour. A tribune made the suggestion that both generals lay down their arms at the same moment and became private citizens, thus not presenting a threat to the other. Opponents said Caesar was a public enemy and should simply relinquish his command, full stop, as he was not more powerful in the state and in no position to make demands of the senate.

(59) Marcellus announces that Caesar is crossing the Alps with ten legions and goes to see Pompey accompanied by the senate to call on him to save the state. But when Pompey tried to levy troops he was surprised at the poor response and reluctance. One reason was that Mark Anthony read out a letter from Caesar in which he suggested that he and Pompey give up their provinces and their armies and submit themselves to the people’s judgement. Cicero proposed a compromise that Caesar give up most but not all of his provinces and retain just 2 legions while he canvassed for a consulship. Arguments. Shouting.

(60) Now news came that Caesar was marching fast into Italy. Caesar pauses at the river Rubicon because it formed the boundary between his allotted province (Cisalpine Gaul) and Italy proper. In Cisalpine Gaul he was official commander and could do as he pleased. But crossing the river was an illegal act, and represented an invasion and subversion of the law.

Caesar took the decision to lead his army across the river and into Italy with the words ‘the die is cast’. The senate immediately asked Pompey to raise the army he had promised to protect Italy, Rome and them – but were horrified to learn that Pompey would struggle to raise a proper army. The legions Caesar had only recently sent back to him were unlikely to march against their former commander.

(61) Pandemonium in Rome, with endless rumour, an outflow of the panicking rich, an influx of refugees, collapse of magistrate authority and Pompey finding it hard to fix on a strategy. He declared a state of civil war, ordered all the senators to follow him, and that evening left the city.

(62) A few days later Caesar arrived in Rome, occupied it, ransacked the treasury for funds with which to pursue Pompey. Caesar wanted Pompey and his army cleared out of Italy before his army from Spain could arrive to reinforce him. Pompey takes his army to Brundisium, occupies and fortifies it then ferries his army ship by ship across to Albania. Caesar arrives but is held at the city walls for nine days while Pompey sailed.

(63) Caesar had sent a friend of Pompey’s, Numerius, to him with free and fair terms. But Pompey had sailed. Without bloodshed Caesar had become master of Rome and Italy. Now he set about and marched all the way to Spain to recruit the armies based there.

(64) Pompey now rallies an enormous army on lad and navy at sea. He inspires the training by taking part himself, aged 58. So many nobles flocked to him that they were able to recreate the senate.

(65) This senate passed a suggestion of Cato’s that no Roman be killed except in actual battle and no Roman cities subjected. This won even more people over to Pompey’s cause.

Meanwhile Caesar also was showing great clemency. After defeating Pompey’s forces in Spain he freely released the commanders and took the soldiers into his own service then marches back to Italy, to Brundisium and crossed to Oricum. He sent an emissary suggesting they lay down their arms, have a conference and become friends as of old. Pompey dismissed it as a trick. Pompey held the coast and dominated supplies. Caesar was hard pressed.

(66) Pompey’s allies pushed him to engage in open battle but Pompey correctly judged that a) Caesar’s army was more battle hardened after years in Gaul but b) they had less supplies – so he planned a war of attrition. Caesar struck camp and marched into Thessaly. Pompey’s supporters were jubilant and behaved as if they’d already won. He was encouraged to cross back to Italy, take total control of it and Rome. But Pompey didn’t want to a) run away again b) abandon his forces in Greece to Caesar c) bring bloodshed into Italy.

(67) So he chose to pursue Caesar, cutting his lines of communication and depriving him of supplies. Plutarch describes Pompey’s suspicions of Cato, who was with him in his camp but who he suspected would demand he lay down his command the second Caesar was defeated. Plutarch paints a grim picture of the politicking and squabbling among the politicians who had accompanied him and spent all their time criticising his plans. It affected his judgement.

(68) Pompey’s army comes out into the plain of Pharsalia. Various of his lieutenants vow not to return to camp until they had routed the enemy. That evening signs and portents are seen in the sky (as they always are). Pompey dreams he is laying tributes in the temple of Venus who was, of course, Caesar’s ancestor. At dawn Caesar was delighted to learn from his scouts that Pompey was preparing for battle.

(69) Pompey had twice as many men as Caesar, 40,000 to 22,000. But Caesar’s army assembled in quiet and confidence whereas Pompey’s were shouting and milling about in their inexperience.

(70) Plutarch takes a chapter to moralise on the pitiful tragic outcome of greed and folly which saw Roman pitted against Roman, family member against family member, when if they had united they could have conquered Scythia, Parthia even India.

(71) The Battle of Pharsalia 9 August 48 BC. Caesar’s troops scatter Pompey’s cavalry with the tactic of pushing their spears up into their faces. Then encircle Pompey’s infantry who panic.

(72) Caesar’s legions triumphed and pushed on into Pompey’s camp. Pompey left the battlefield to sit in his tent in shock, then rallied his men and rode away. 6,000 were killed. Caesar’s men found Pompey’s tents adorned with garlands, dressed for a feast. Such was their inexperience of battle and foolish hopes.

(73) Pompey escaped with a handful of companions. Plutarch paints him as mournfully reviewing the sudden collapse in his fortunes, the first time he’d ever lost a battle. He escaped to the coast and took a fisherman’s boat to a port where he boarded a merchantman. Its captain, Peticius, just happened to have had a dream the night before in which Pompey came imploring. Now he sculls up in a boat with a handful of companions in poor shape. Peticius takes them aboard and offers them a meal.

(74) They sail to Mytilene to take on board Pompey’s wife and son. He sends them a messenger. In best melodramatic tradition the messenger doesn’t say anything but his tears tell the story and Cornelia flings herself on the ground where she lies a long time motionless. Odd that this is the universal attitude of despair in these texts, compared with our modern stock attitude which would be thrashing around and ranting.

Cornelia is given a speech out of a Greek tragedy bewailing her lot, as wife to Publius Crassus, who met a miserable death in Parthia, and now wishing she had killed herself then and not brought bad luck to Pompey.

(75) Pompey is given a stock speech in reply about Fortune and they are only mortals and might rise again. Cornelia sends for her things. The people of Mytilene want to invite Pompey in but he refuses and says the conqueror will come soon enough. More interesting is the little digression in which Pompey was said to have had a conversation with the local philosopher, Cratippus, about Providence. Plutarch slips in the moral of the entire book:

For when Pompey raised questions about Providence, Cratippus might have answered that the state now required a monarchy because it was so badly administered.

The Romans mismanaged their way into a disastrous civil war.

(76) At its next stop the ship is met by some of Pompey’s navy. This has survived intact and he laments the fact that he didn’t make more use of it but allowed himself to be lured into battle far from the sea. He learns Cato rescued many of the soldiers and is shipping them over to Libya. He has been joined by his lieutenants and 60 or so senators. The plan is to recruit more men from the cities. Emissaries are sent out. Pompey and advisers debate where to hole up while they recuperate their forces. Some argue for Libya, some for far-off Parthia. But the strongest voices are for Egypt which is only three days’ sail ,away and where the young king Ptolemy owes his throne to Pompey.

(77) So they sail south to Egypt in a Seleucian trireme from Cyprus, accompanied by warships and merchant ships. When they arrive they discover Ptolemy is at war with his sister Cleopatra. Ptolemy’s advisers hold a conclave on what to do, led by Potheinus the eunuch. Theodotus the rhetorician wins the day by arguing they should kill Pompey thus pleasing Caesar and removing the threat.

(78) Pompey was in a small boat which had approached the shore. Potheinus and Theodotus deputed the task of receiving him to some Roman soldiers who had gravitated to Ptolemy’s court, Achillas, Septimius and Salvius. When the Romans saw a handful of men coming towards them in an ordinary boat, none of the pomp of the pharaoh, they sensed something was wrong. But as the Egyptian boat came up they and the Romans in it hailed them they saw other boats being manned on the shore. To fly would show lack of confidence and trigger attack. So Pompey embraced his wife who was already weeping as if he were dead, and taking a few servants, Philip and Scythe, stepped into the Egyptian boat.

(79) The men in the boat were cold and distant from Pompey. He took out his notebook to practice the speech to Ptolemy in Greek which he had practiced. As they reached the shore Pompey stretched his arm up to be helped to his feet and Septimius ran him through with a sword from behind, then Achillas and Salvius stabbed him, too. Pompey drew his toga over his face and fell.

(80) From the Roman fleet a mighty groan then they set sail and left before the Egyptian fleet could come out. The Egyptians cut off Pompey’s head and threw his body into the sea. His servant Philip waited till they’d left then scavenged along the shore for enough wood to build a pyre. Along comes an old Roman, a veteran, and offers to help, and so these two poor men built and supervised the burning of one of the greatest Romans of all.

Next day a ship carrying Lucius Lentulus comes into view, he lands and sees the pyre and asks Philip about his master’s fate, and delivers a lament as from a tragedy. Then he was captured by the Egyptians and also put to death.

Plutarch ends his narrative by tying up the loose ends. When Caesar landed and was presented with the head of Pompey he was disgusted, when shown his ring he burst into tears. He had Achillas and Potheinus put to death. King Ptolemy was defeated in battle and disappeared into the interior never to be heard of again. The sophist Theodotus fled but many years later, after Caesar’s assassination, Brutus tracked him down in Asia and had him put to death with many tortures. The ashes of Pompey were taken to his widow who buried them at his country house near Alba.

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by Simon on May 9, 2022 • Permalink

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Tagged Achillas, Aemilia, Afranius, agnomen, Amazons, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Antistia, Aristobulus, Armenia, Asia, Athens, Aulus Gabinius, battle of Pharsalia, Biography, Bituitus, Black Sea, Brutus, Caenum, Campus Martius, Carinas, Cato, Cato the Younger, Catulus, Cicero, Cilicia, Cinna, Cisalpine Gaul, civil war, Cleopatra, Cloelius, consulship, Cornelia, Cratippus, Cyprus, Demetrius, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Egypt, Elymaeans, First Triumvirate, Fortune, Gaul, Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, Gnaeus Pompeius, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, Greece, history, Hyrcania, IIlyricum, Italy, Julius Caesar, King Mithridates VI, Lepidus, lex Vatinia, Libya, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, Lucius Lentulus, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, Manilius, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Pupius Piso, Mark Anthony, Medes, Mediterranean, Metellus, Mytilene, Numerius, Numidia, Parallel Lives, Parthia, Parthian Empire, Perpenna, Peticius, Pharnaces, Philip, Phraates, pirates, Plutarch, Pompey, Pompey the Great, Pontus, Potheinus, Ptolemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Crassus, Publius Vatinius, Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius, Rhodes, Roman history, Roman Senate, Rubicon, Salvius, Sardinia, Scipio, Scythe, Scythia, Septimius, Sertorius, Spartacus, Stratonice, Sulla, Theodotus, Thessaly, Tigranes, tribunate, trireme, triumvirate, Utica

Posted by Simon on May 9, 2022

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Plutarch’s lives of Marius and Sulla (translated by Rex Warner)

Now the generals of this later period were men who had risen to the top by violence rather than by merit; they needed armies to fight against one another rather than against the public enemy.
(Doleful reflections of the Amphictyons of Delphi upon being ordered to hand over all their treasure to the Roman general Sulla who was besieging Athens: Life of Sulla, chapter 12)

1. Plutarch’s Life of Caius Marius (157 to 86 BC)

Plutarch’s life of Marius is divided into 46 brief sections. Rex Warner’s translation of Plutarch in the Penguin edition is relaxed and chatty. Very clear, very readable. However it is not available online whereas the 1920 Loeb Classical Library edition is. So, for practical purposes, I’ll quote Loeb.

As for the personal appearance of Marius, we have seen a marble statue of him at Ravenna in Gaul, and it very well portrays the harshness and bitterness of character which were ascribed to him. For since he was naturally virile and fond of war, and since he received a training in military rather than in civil life, his temper was fierce when he came to exercise authority.

Plutarch brings out very vividly the successive rivalries during the Jugurthine War (112 to 106 BC) between Metellus, Marius, and his quaestor Sulla. The Roman army comes over as an engine of fierce rivalries. But although Plutarch describes some of Marius’s military victories, in Numidia (112 to 106 BC) and then against the Cimbrian and Teutons who threatened to invade Italy from Gaul (113 to 101 BC) what really impresses is the second half of the life, and especially the final years when Marius fell from military and political favour and was eventually outlawed from Italy and had to go on the run, in disguise.

These final sections of his adventures on the run (35 to 45) read more like a boy’s own adventure story than history. The modern histories I’ve read refer to Marius’s brief exile only in general terms whereas in Plutarch we meet the captains of the ships which smuggle him out of Ostia, then dump him further down the Italian coast, the peasants who take him in and try to hide him, his betrayal and arrest to the authorities. We meet the Cimbrian soldier who is ordered to kill him but can’t bring himself to do so because, in the darkened bedroom, he sees Marius’s eyes darting fire and hears the voice of a god warning him against such a wicked deed. And so on. It’s like something out of the Arabian Nights more than history, more even, than biography.

Superstitions

Rex and other commentators emphasise Plutarch’s focus on the individual, on character, and call him ‘the first of modern biographers’ (p.9). None of them mention the ubiquity of superstition, prophecies and the uncanny i.e. the irrational, in his narratives. Thus in Marius alone:

as Marius prepares to sail back from Africa to Rome a soothsayer predicts great things (8)
in the campaign against the Cimbri and Teutones Marius has a Syrian prophetess named Martha accompany him in a litter (17)
the story that his army was accompanied everywhere by two vultures (17)
over the Italian cities of Ameria and Tuder flaming spears and swords are seen in the sky moving as if in actual battle (17)
from the massed ranks of the enemy arose an unearthly wailing (20)
heavy rain often follows a major battle because the supernatural powers want to hallow and cleanse the earth (21)
Fortune or nemesis or natural necessity, call it what you will, some force always ensures the enjoyment of any great success is never unalloyed or pure (23)
the incident of Fannia’s donkey who ran out to drink water from a spring near where Marius was being held by his escort, stopped directly in front of him, let out a tremendous bray, then went frisking past him – from which Marius drew the conclusion that his escape would be by sea

And:

When he was quite young and living in the country, Marius had caught in his cloak a falling eagle’s nest, which had seven young ones in it; at sight of this, his parents were amazed, and made enquiries of the seers, who told them that their son would be most illustrious of men, and was destined to receive the highest command and power seven times. (36)

when a Cimbrian soldier went into Marius’s bedroom to kill him he saw a pair of mighty eyes darting flame at him and a voice as of a god saying: ‘Man, does thou dare to slay Caius Marius?’ (39)

The grotesque

A sprinkling of what must surely be grotesque exaggerations, notably the wildly improbable description of the mass suicides of the Cimbri civilians once their menfolk were defeated

The fugitives were driven back to their entrenchments where the Romans beheld a most tragic spectacle. The women, in black garments, stood at the wagons and slew the fugitives — their husbands or brothers or fathers, then strangled their little children and cast them beneath the wheels of the wagons or the feet of the cattle, and then cut their own throats. It is said that one woman hung dangling from the tip of a wagon-pole with her children tied to either ankle, while the men, for lack of trees, fastened themselves by the neck to the horns of the cattle, or to their legs, then plied the goad, and were dragged or trampled to death as the cattle dashed away. (27)

In their hurry to claim for Plutarch all kinds of proto-modern interests in character and psychology, Rex and others simply ignore the much more prominent traits of primitive superstition and a garish, vulgar fascination with grotesque violence.

Thus Plutarch dwells lovingly on the scenes in Rome once Marius has returned from exile, seizes power along with Cinna, and unleashes a tidal wave of vengeful violence:

Headless trunks thrown into the streets and trampled under foot excited no pity, though everybody trembled and shuddered at the sight. The people were most distressed however, by the wanton licence of the Bardyaei, as they were called, who butchered fathers of families in their houses, outraged their children, raped their wives, and could not be checked in their career of rapine and murder until Cinna and Sertorius, after taking counsel together, fell upon them as they were asleep in their camp, and transfixed them all with javelins. (44)

Gory enough for you?

The ludicrous

And then incidents which are so wildly improbable as to be ludicrous. Take the incident of the faked diarrhoea. Marius fell in with a rabble rousing demagogue who didn’t hesitate to murder his political opponents, Saturninus. Marius attempts to keep the respect of the senate but also stay in with Saturninus, a balancing act which is epitomised one night:

For when the leading men had come to him by night and were trying to incite him against Saturninus, without their knowledge he introduced Saturninus into the house by another door; then, pretending to both parties that he had a diarrhoea, he would run backwards and forwards in the house, now to the nobles and now to Saturninus, trying to irritate and bring them into collision. (30)

2. Plutarch’s Life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138 to 78 BC)

Sulla served as captain of cavalry under Marius in the Jugurthine War. To his bravery was attributed the final negotiations which led to the capture of Jugurtha and Sulla was embittered when Marius received the credit and triumph for it. Sulla was tasked with fighting the Social War (91 to 87 BC) and when Marius, in Rome, managed to manoeuvre Sulla out of leadership of the army set to head off to deal with Mithradates in Turkey, Sulla rejected the senate’s decision, let his men kill the senate’s envoy and marched on Rome.

Why Sulla failed

Rex gives admirably brief, one-page introductions to each of the lives (generally pointing out how Plutarch ignores the profound historical importance of this or that event in order to focus on trivial anecdotes or shallow moralising). Therefore it is Rex who sums up Sulla’s political agenda, once he’d become dictator (82 to 78 BC) and why it failed, more briefly and better than any other account I’ve read.

After marching on Rome to seize power twice, with an intervening period of anarchy and bloodshed under Cinna (87 to 84 BC), Sulla set out to make the republic safe by ensuring the situation which led to the anarchy could never happen again. These he took to be:

the ability of the tribunes of the plebs to veto laws suggested by the patricians and senate, which sounds fine in theory, but in practice tribunes were all too often bribed by powerful interests to derail senatorial rule
the struggle between senate and equites for control of the courts, which again unravelled into political powerplays
the consecutive consulships of overmighty rulers (in the recent past the consecutive consulships of Marius in 107, 104, 103, 102, 101, 100)

So Sulla:

abolished the legislative powers of the tribunate and debarred those who held it from higher office
restored the courts to full control of the senate
revived the lex annalis which set minimum ages to hold each of the magistracies in the so-called cursus honorum and required fixed periods between people holding each post

It was a valiant effort but, as Rex points out, it was blind to the fact that the chief threat to the republic came not from any law or aspect of the constitution but from a reality which transcended them, which was the advent of proconsuls appointed for long periods of time to prosecute distant wars whose armies came to owe more allegiance to them than to the state – the conversion of Roman armies into something closer to private armies answerable to charismatic warlords.

The obvious examples were Marius, Sulla himself, Pompey then Caesar, then Mark Anthony and Octavian and the era of instability and collapse exactly matches the rise of this new phenomenon.

Plutarch’s Sulla

Predictably, Plutarch focuses on gossip and anecdote:

Sulla had a famously bad complexion, covered in blotchy spots.
Though he came from a patrician family, it was very down at heel and he spent a dissolute young manhood with dancers and actors and cross-dressers and comedians. Throughout his life, strict and stern in public, once he sat down at a banquet he reverted to a monstrously debauched and bohemian character.

And, once again, a blizzard of superstitions, omens and prophecies:

A certain man in the retinue of Orobazus, a Chaldaean, after looking Sulla intently in the face, and studying carefully the movements of his mind and body, and investigating his nature according to the principles of his peculiar art, declared that this man must of necessity become the greatest in the world, and that even now the wonder was that he consented not to be first of all men. (6)
Sulla himself relates that when he was dispatched with an army to the Social War, a great chasm in the earth opened near Laverna, from which a great quantity of fire burst forth and a bright flame towered up towards the heavens; whereupon the soothsayers declared that a brave man, of rare courage and surpassing appearance, was to take the government in hand and free the city from its present troubles. And Sulla says that he himself was this man, for his golden head of hair gave him a singular appearance, and as for bravery, he was not ashamed to testify in his own behalf, after such great and noble deeds as he had performed.
When Sulla had set out for his camp on unfinished business, he himself kept at home and contrived that most fatal sedition, which wrought Rome more harm than all her wars together had done, as indeed the heavenly powers foreshadowed to them:
- for fire broke forth of its own accord from the staves which supported the ensigns, and was with difficulty extinguished
- and three ravens brought their young forth into the street and devoured them, and then carried the remains back again into their nest
- and after mice had gnawed consecrated gold in a temple, the keepers caught one of them, a female, in a trap, and in the very trap she brought forth five young ones and ate up three of them
- but most important of all, out of a cloudless and clear air there rang out the voice of a trumpet, prolonging a shrill and dismal note, so that all were amazed and terrified at its loudness. The Tuscan wise men declared that the prodigy foretokened a change of conditions and the advent of a new age (7)
While the senate was busied with the soothsayers about these prodigies, and holding its session in the temple of Bellona, a sparrow came flying in, before the eyes of all, with a grasshopper in its mouth, a part of which it threw down and left there, and then went away with the other part. From this the diviners apprehended a quarrelsome dissension between the landed proprietors and the populace of the city and forum; for the latter is vociferous like a grasshopper, while the former haunt the fields (like the sparrow). (7)
After he had offered a sacrifice, Postumius the soothsayer learned what the omens were, and stretching out both hands to Sulla, begged that he might be bound and kept a prisoner until the battle, assuring him that he was willing to undergo the extremest penalty if all things did not speedily come to a good issue for him. (9)
It is said, also, that to Sulla himself there appeared in his dreams a goddess whom the Romans learned to worship from the Cappadocians, whether she is Luna, or Minerva, or Bellona. This goddess, as Sulla fancied, stood by his side and put into his hand a thunder-bolt, and naming his enemies one by one, bade him smite them with it; and they were all smitten, and fell, and vanished away. Encouraged by the vision, he told it to his colleague, and at break of day led on towards Rome. (9)
Mithridates, who was staying at Pergamum, was visited with many other portents from Heaven, and that a Victory with a crown in her hand, which the Pergamenians were lowering towards him by machinery of some sort, was broken to pieces just as she was about to touch his head, and the crown went tumbling from her hand to the ground in the midst of the theatre, and was shattered, whereat the people shuddered, and Mithridates was greatly dejected. (11)

And so on and very much on. And The Grotesque:

Nearby is Apollonia, and in its vicinity is the Nymphaeum, a sacred precinct, which sends forth in various places from its green dell and meadows, streams of perpetually flowing fire. Here, they say, a satyr was caught asleep, such an one as sculptors and painters represent, and brought to Sulla, where he was asked through many interpreters who he was. And when at last he uttered nothing intelligible, but with difficulty emitted a hoarse cry that was something between the neighing of a horse and the bleating of a goat, Sulla was horrified, and ordered him out of his sight. (27)

Fairy tales

At Fidentia, when Marcus Lucullus, one of Sulla’s commanders, with sixteen cohorts confronted fifty cohorts of the enemy, although he had confidence in the readiness of his soldiers, still, as most of them were without arms, he hesitated to attack. But while he was waiting and deliberating, from the neighbouring plain, which was a meadow, a gentle breeze brought a quantity of flowers and scattered them down on his army; they settled of their own accord and enveloped the shields and helmets of the soldiers, so that to the enemy these appeared to be crowned with garlands. This circumstance made them more eager for the fray, and they joined battle, won the victory, killed eighteen thousand of the enemy, and took their camp. (27)

Fortunate Sulla

Plutarch emphasises the Sulla himself was happy to attribute much of his success to Fortune rather than his own personal merits or achievements. So in the matrix of opinions about what constitutes a Successful Man which the Parallel Lives amount to, Sulla stands at one extreme of the spectrum, a superstitious man who attributed much to Fortune. Hence his own insistence on the agnomen (‘a fourth name occasionally given as an honour to an ancient Roman citizen’) ‘Felix’, superficially meaning ‘happy’ but at a deeper level meaning ‘lucky’ – more than lucky, in the deepest sense of the word, fortune-ate. Fortune rich. Fortune full.

Slaughter in Athens 86 BC

Apart from the civil war and street fighting in Rome, what comes over more vividly from this account than others I’ve read, is the unmitigated slaughter Sulla inflicted on Athens after a prolonged siege in which he had devastated the surrounding territory. ‘There was no counting the slain’. The blood flowed under the city gates (14).

Proscriptions in Rome

The mass murder in Rome of Sulla’s enemies who he included on lists of ‘proscriptions’ brings to mind Stalin sitting up late into the night going through long lists of names, putting a tick or a cross next to who should live or die.

Sulla now busied himself with slaughter, and murders without number or limit filled the city…He also proscribed anyone who harboured and saved a proscribed person, making death the punishment for such humanity, without exception of brother, son, or parents, but offering anyone who slew a proscribed person two talents as a reward for this murderous deed, even though a slave should slay his master, or a son his father. And what seemed the greatest injustice of all, he took away the civil rights from the sons and grandsons of those who had been proscribed, and confiscated the property of all. Moreover, proscriptions were made not only in Rome, but also in every city of Italy, and neither temple of God, nor hearth of hospitality, nor paternal home was free from the stain of bloodshed, but husbands were butchered in the embraces of their wedded wives, and sons in the arms of their mothers. (31)

Mass murder at Praeneste

Meanwhile Marius the younger, at the point of being captured slew himself; and Sulla, coming to Praeneste, at first gave each man there a separate trial before he executed him, but afterwards, since time failed him, gathered them all together in one place — there were twelve thousand of them — and gave orders to slaughter them all. (32)

Metrobius

Plutarch’s life ends where it began, with comments on Sulla’s private behaviour and liking for louche, lowlife, bohemian company. Despite having a series of respectable wives, in the usual Roman fashion, Sulla also:

consorted with actresses, harpists, and theatrical people, drinking with them on couches all day long. For these were the men who had most influence with him now: Roscius the comedian, Sorex the archmime, and Metrobius the impersonator of women, for whom, though past his prime, he continued up to the last to be passionately fond, and made no denial of it.

Mass murderer, sacker of Athens, failed attempter to restore the Republic, and lifelong lover of a female impersonator.

A grisly end

Then comes the kind of moralising conclusion which delighted the ancients and then the Christians, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Plutarch claims that in his final illness Sulla was literally eaten alive by worms.

By this mode of life [his decadent lifestyle] Sulla aggravated a disease which was insignificant in its beginnings, and for a long time he knew not that his bowels were ulcerated. This disease corrupted his whole flesh also, and converted it into worms, so that although many were employed day and night in removing them, what they took away was as nothing compared with the increase upon him, but all his clothing, baths, hand-basins, and food, were infected with that flux of corruption, so violent was its discharge. Therefore he immersed himself many times a day in water to cleanse and scour his person. But it was of no use; for the change gained upon him rapidly, and the swarm of vermin defied all purification. (36)

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by Simon on April 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History

Posted by Simon on April 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/04/29/marius-sulla-plutarch/

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The Year One by M.I. Finley (1968)

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The Roman Republic by Michael Crawford (second edition, 1992)

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Who was the Roman oligarchy?

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Plutarch’s lives of Marius and Sulla (translated by Rex Warner)

1. Plutarch’s Life of Caius Marius (157 to 86 BC)

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2. Plutarch’s Life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138 to 78 BC)

Why Sulla failed

Plutarch’s Sulla

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