Although the son of a consul and the inheritor of the largest private estate in Italy, Pompey should not be mistaken for an aristocrat at the heart of the Establishment. He was a young man on the make and unencumbered by any sentimental attachment to the political traditions of the republican past. He was, above all, an extraordinary soldier. Ambitious, daring and famed for his mane of blond hair, he was called Magnus (the Great) by his own soldiers (in an echo of his boyhood hero Alexander the Great). He had justified the name with his brilliant execution of a campaign in Africa in 80 BC at the age of twenty-six. His greatest gift, however, was an ability to spot an opportunity that might further his glory. As consul in 70 BC, he seized such an opportunity, changed sides and joined the populists. He not only reinstated the power of the tribunes, but reformed the court juries so that they no longer favoured senators. In addition, he saw to it that sixty-four second-rate senators, all Sullan appointees, were struck off the census list. The people fell in love with him. Although many senators opposed Pompey, the great general had the backing of a young senator, Gaius Julius Caesar.
With the entry of Pompey and Caesar into the ring of Roman politics in 70 BC, the pendulum of popular politics was about to swing back in favour of the populists, but this time in the most spectacular fashion. There was one simple reason for this. Learning from the ruthless example set by Sulla, Pompey and Caesar would, over the next two decades, accumulate more personal power and influence in Rome than any politician before them. Unlike Sulla, however, they sought to boost not the power of the Senate, but the power of the populists. It was no coincidence that they had restored the power of the tribunes because now, to win such power, they were going to need them.
POMPEY, CAESAR AND CATO
Pompey blazed the trail. In 67 BC a tribune proposed to the popular assembly that the people’s hero, even though he held no office at the time, be awarded a special command to rid the Mediterranean of pirates, who were then profiteering in the lawless wake of Rome’s many wars of conquest. The situation had reached crisis point because the pirates’ grip on the Mediterranean was now causing a grain shortage in Rome. The job of defeating the pirate fleets over such a vast geographical space was huge. To pull it off Pompey would need more ships, more soldiers and more time in command than any general had been awarded before.
Alarm bells went off in the Senate. The power Pompey would have at his disposal – five hundred ships, 120,000 soldiers and a three-year command – would make a mockery of the equality of members of the élite. Granting him that power was as good as establishing a monarch over the republic in all but name. Nonetheless, the people ratified the bill and Pompey set to work. His success astounded everyone. He not only defeated the pirates, but did so in just three months. He then used the rest of his time in command to outstrip this achievement and carry out the single greatest sweep of Roman conquest in the east. It was a feat to rival the great conquest of Greece in the second century BC. Swimming on a tide of extraordinary success, the general was rewarded with another command. Once again, a tribune put a law before the people that would grant Pompey the command of the war to finish off King Mithridates in Asia.
Pompey was no less ambitious in this task – and his results were even more staggering. Over the next three years, he not only defeated Mithridates, but created and settled – through a combination of diplomacy and war – two new Roman provinces: Syria and Judaea. As a result of both his campaigns, Pompey could boast that he had captured 1000 fortified places, nine hundred cities and eight hundred pirate ships. He had founded thirty-nine cities and, in addition to the 20,000 talents with which the coffers of the public treasury bulged, the public revenue from taxation in the east had nearly doubled – all thanks to Pompey. The senators back in Rome were by turns delighted, amazed and horrified. In Pompey’s appointment of a king here, in his striking of a peace treaty there, or in his capture of a foreign city, it was almost as though he was indeed a new and all-powerful Alexander. The senators’ fear remained: would he and his army seize absolute power on his return to Rome?
Crucially, when Pompey returned to Italy, he dispersed his troops and submitted to the Senate. It was an acknowledgement that, although at the very height of his popularity and power, he had no intention of wielding these attributes against the republic. He had his terms, however: the settlement of his soldiers on plots of Italian soil as a reward for their service, and the ratification of the treaties he had made in the east. This was still a source of concern for the conservatives in the Senate. To agree to these terms would be to acknowledge the preeminence of Pompey in the republic. It would confirm that he had won the personal loyalty both of the Roman army and of kings, potentates and peoples in the east. The conservatives in the Senate did eventually award the people’s hero an unprecedented third triumph, but stopped short of meeting his wishes. They delayed and delayed, shutting the general out in the cold. Here Pompey the Great now languished, with only his growing bitterness for company.
Meanwhile, in the 60s BC Gaius Julius Caesar, six years Pompey’s junior, was also building personal power. Unlike Pompey, Caesar came from an ancient patrician family that claimed descent from the Trojan Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Aeneas was thought to have been the son of Venus, so Caesar was also able to claim descent from the gods. This was a claim he lost no opportunity to make; it established him as more blue-blooded than anyone else in the Roman republic could possibly be. At the grand, aristocratic funeral of his aunt and his first wife he laid out the two planks of his political career with the economy and effectiveness of a public relations company. He praised his aunt’s divine ancestry (and thus by implication his own too) and also demonstrated his political sympathies, not through words, but actions. As his aunt had been married to the great general Marius, he ensured that mourners paraded her husband’s wax masks. In this way Caesar declared that his was the cause of the populists. Such flamboyance was matched by his dress. Caesar had a reputation as a dandy: he wore his hair carefully parted and combed, and sported his toga with a dashing loose belt.4 Such displays of behaviour offended the conservatives in the Senate. Little did they realize that there was much worse to come.
In the early 70s BC Caesar made his political sympathies apparent when he undertook to prosecute two corrupt aristocratic governors of the provinces of Macedonia and Greece. Although he lost the trials, he gained great popularity with the plebs. Through his eloquence, ebullient charm and friendly good manners, he showed how easily he could win people over.5 However, he realized that to win sufficient favour with the Roman people to reach the highest offices in the republic it was necessary to make a much bigger splash than that. With this ambition in mind, Caesar exploited office after office for all it was worth.
The post of curule aedile, for example, carried with it the responsibility of staging public games on state holidays. Elected to this position in 65 BC, Caesar duly seized the opportunity to wow the people of Rome by putting on the most spectacular gladiatorial games the city had ever seen. No fewer than 320 pairs of gladiators clad in burnished silver armour prepared to compete for glory and delight the public. The anticipated occasion caused such a sensation with the Roman people that the conservatives in the Senate immediately proposed a bill curtailing the number of gladiators any individual might keep in the city.6 In this way, they tried to deter the politician from so shamelessly winning popular favour. In the event, the people had to make do with a more modest show, but the impact had been made.