042 - Meanwhile, Back in Rome

After completing his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar entered into a sort of holding pattern. The Senate refused to let him return to Rome until he disbanded his army, but Caesar refused to return unless he was allowed to keep his army. It was a critical moment not just for Caesar, but for the fate of the whole Roman world. We all know what happened, or we will shortly, but before we get into that tense showdown, I want to wind the clock back a few years.

Though the war in Gaul was unquestionably the most famous thing to have occurred in the decade, the rest of Rome did not simply stop what they were doing and wait for another dispatch from mighty Caesar. Indeed, it would be difficult to understand why Caesar felt he was forced to cross the Rubicon without understanding what had happened in his absence. It was a decade that saw the death of Crassus after one of Rome's greatest military defeats, the breaking of the Triumvirate, and increasing civil unrest in the city as both the populist tribunes and the conservative Senate grew more inflexible and radicalized. Rome and Caesar were on a collision course that would destroy the 500-year-old Republic.

You may recall that near the end of his consulship in 59 B.C., Caesar sponsored the adoption of a one Mr. Clodius Pulcher by a plebeian, allowing the flamboyant demagogue to abandon his patrician status and run for tribune. This was in retaliation for the sharp attack Cicero had publicly leveled against Caesar, as Clodius was one of the great orator's most bitter enemies. The whole adoption was completely illegal for a laundry list of reasons, but you may have noticed that the rule of law did not count for much in Rome these days.

Once Clodius was in a position of authority, the deal was that he would go after Cicero full bore and make him realize that messing with Caesar was very bad for his health. But of course, once he was off his leash, there was little stopping Clodius from making everyone realize that messing with Clodius was bad for everyone's health.

Immediately upon attaining the tribunate, Clodius passed a law making exile the punishment for killing a Roman citizen without trial. There was absolutely no doubt who the intended target of the law was, as this was exactly what Cicero had done when putting down the Catiline conspiracy. Once the law was passed, Clodius and the growing gang of thugs whom he surrounded himself with drummed up popular support for the banishment of Cicero from Rome.

At first, Cicero could scarcely believe that the gambit would work and turned to his friends in the Senate for support and specifically to Pompey to put a stop to the craziness. But the word had gone out that the triumvirate supported Clodius' vendetta against Cicero. Though neither Caesar nor Pompey necessarily supported banishing Cicero, they felt compelled to follow through on what they had set in motion. When Pompey refused to speak on Cicero's behalf, the craziness became reality.

In 58 BC, no doubt still reeling in disbelief, Cicero packed up and sailed for Macedonia, unsure if he would ever see Rome again. It was, by his own admission, the lowest moment of his life, and he confessed that during his exile, suicide crossed his mind on more than one occasion.

With Cicero out of the way, Clodius next set his sights on Cato. The triumvirate had far fewer misgivings about getting rid of the moralizing teetotaler and embraced Clodius' scheme to remove the powerful senator from Rome. Clodius, who obviously saw politics through a highly personal lens, hatched a plot to take care of two enemies at once.

When he was a young man, Clodius, like Caesar, had been taken hostage by Cilician pirates. The young patrician had demanded that the king of nearby Cyprus pay the ransom, but the king had refused to come to the aid of this demanding young nobody, earning the lifelong enmity of Clodius, who now, suddenly, was somebody. So now, after years of nursing a grudge, Clodius had his revenge.

He passed a law stripping Cyprus of its client kingdom status and annexing it officially into the empire. He then nominated Cato as the perfect candidate to govern the new territory, what with his well-known administrative skills and reputation for honesty, etc., etc. Cato was flummoxed. He couldn't say no to the appointment, but did not want to leave the city at this critical hour. It was clear that Rome was being taken over by lawless thugs, who would destroy all that was good and pure about Rome if they were not checked. But like Cicero before him, he could find no one who would help him avoid this de facto banishment. So Cato left Rome, the king of Cyprus was deposed, and Clodius patted himself on the back. This was almost too easy.

For his next trick, Clodius introduced Rome to something that, at the time, was highly controversial, hence the need to get rid of Cato and Cicero, but would soon become an undislodgable cornerstone of public policy, the free grain doll. The overpopulation and underemployment in the city was a source of constant worry and tension for middle and upper class Romans. With more than a million people now crammed on top of one another, everyone was aware that if these people were not fed, the richest, most powerful city of the ancient world would likely be consumed by its own hungry citizens.

To this end, it had been policy since the days of the Gracchi to sell grain at a heavily subsidized price, but Clodius decided to take it one step further. He pointed out to the teeming masses that they all lived in, well, the richest, most powerful city in the world, and it was a gross injustice that the nobles lived such splendid lives, enjoying all the luxuries that empire afforded, while they lived in such squalor, barely able to feed themselves. Veterans who had fought to win the empire that now sustained the rich deserved better. Farmers who had been displaced by slaves so the rich could make more money deserved better. Roman citizens who had seen their standard of living deteriorate because of the influx into the city of the former two groups deserved better. They all deserved better.

The mobs were eager to buy what Clodius was selling, because Clodius wasn't planning to sell them anything, he was planning to give them stuff for free. And nothing says popular like free stuff. So Clodius was able to push through his free grain allotments, which ultimately served some 200,000 poor citizens of Rome.

Augustus would consider repealing the grain dull during his reign, but ultimately decided against it. Once given, it is hard to take away, and it simply wasn't worth the price of feeding the masses to risk revolution. Free grain was here to stay.

But despite his efforts to neutralize his enemies, Clodius was not operating in a political vacuum. In 57 BC, after just a single year in exile, good thing he didn't kill himself, a movement began to have Cicero recalled to Rome. The faction was led by Titus Aeneas Melo, a Poblian agitator who had previously worked in support of Pompey, but who now aligned himself with the conservative senate against the triumvirate. Melo was, further, personal friends with Cicero. He was elected tribune alongside Clodius in 57 BC, and made it a priority to bring his friend home.

The rivalry between Clodius and Melo would define Roman street politics for the next few years. Both controlled gangs of former soldiers and gladiators who could be mobilized at a moment's notice to support this or that proposal. Violent clashes and small-scale riots became a frequent feature of Roman life, as the heads of these rival gangs fought physically where once words had been the weapon of choice. The degeneration of discourse from verbal sparring to literal sparring would be the catalyst for Pompey's elevation to a near-dictatorship, which we will get to in a moment.

Melo, despite Clodius' attempts to physically halt the proceedings, managed to lift the judgment on Cicero, and in the summer of 57 BC, the senator was welcomed back to Italy by an adoring crowd, much to his happy surprise. But his return to Rome was bittersweet. In his absence, Clodius had confiscated Cicero's estates, both in the country and on the Palatine Hill, and had them demolished. While Cicero returned from Greece, Melo had directed workers to begin rebuilding his friend's home, and the construction site became the scene of multiple violent clashes, as Clodius sent in his thugs to disrupt the effort.

Eventually, the running battles between Clodius and Melo would turn deadly, and one would wind up dead and the other exiled. But before we get to that, we need to turn to Caesar's triumvirate colleagues who, as you'll recall, were preparing themselves to be co-consuls in 55 BC.

The consular elections of 56 BC, which saw Crassus and Pompey victorious, would take records amounts of bribery to pull off. Opposition to the triumvirate, it seemed, was unifying and solidifying, and it was getting more and more difficult for the three men to simply assert their will. Thus, the consulship of Pompey and Crassus was centered on the question of each man's future.

As agreed, they extended Caesar's pro-consulship in Gaul for another five years, which would leave him immune to prosecution through 49 BC. This was of the utmost importance, as it would get Caesar through the mandated ten-year waiting period between consulships. Caesar believed that if he could survive until the second consulship, he could do enough in that term to insulate himself from prosecution for the rest of his life.

After easing Caesar's troubled mind, they looked out for themselves. Crassus would be assigned to the governorship of Syria for a period of five years, and Pompey would be given Spain for the same length of time.

The two men saw their eventual pro-consulships from entirely different perspectives. Pompey, for his part, made sure that he would be allowed to rule his province without actually having to go there. He was getting up there in years, and had already fought his way to the ends of the known world and come home triumphant. He was fast losing interest in the world of war and politics. All he wanted to do now was retire in Rome with his young bride, Julia. The governorship of Spain was meant to leave him with a steady income, not to afford any opportunities for further glory. He was, after all, Pompey the Great. What more did he have left to prove?

Crassus, on the other hand, though he was even older than Pompey, still dreamed of a triumph, something that would fill the gaping hole in his record. His youthful exploit to the Battle of the Coligne Gate had long been forgotten, and his victory over Spartacus had come almost twenty years before. When people thought of Pompey, they thought of his great military victories. When they thought of Crassus, they thought of the fact that they had to pay him rent every month. Great monuments are built for the former, not so much the latter.

So in late 55 BC, Crassus set out for Syria to build himself a great army so he could invade Parthia, while Pompey set out for the kitchen to make himself a nice snack and take a nap.

Throughout 54 BC, Crassus used his personal wealth to raise seven legions in Syria, some thirty-five thousand to forty thousand troops. At his request, and with Caesar's approval, Crassus' son Publius was released from service in Gaul and rode to meet his father at the head of a thousand Celtic cavalrymen. Crassus trained his army, drilled his army, and re-drilled his army until they were in fighting shape. He couldn't wait to get his expedition started, identifying the next spring as the latest he wanted to get going.

But Crassus' impatience would prove to be his undoing and lead him to make a disastrous strategic decision right at the outset. The buffer state Armenia, which Pompey had secured peaceful relationships with the decade before, agreed to help Crassus in his quest to peel off territory from the Parthians. The Armenian king pledged fifty thousand troops. The only stipulation was that Crassus had to come north and invade Parthia via Armenia. Basically, the king wanted Crassus to swing through and pick up the Armenian army on his way to the front.

But Crassus refused to delay, and after crossing the Euphrates River and finding himself welcomed by the Hellenized natives, decided he was better off making immediately for bigger fish, rather than going back to get the Armenians. But the natives Crassus initially encountered were not so much friendly as they were treacherous.

A local chieftain told Crassus that the Parthians were scattered and afraid of the invading Romans. But the chieftain was a Parthian plant, and when he agreed to show Crassus the best route to the great Parthian cities, it was not hard to imagine what happened next. In actuality, the Parthians were not scattered and afraid, they were concentrated and confident. The Parthian army headed for Armenia to punish the conspiring Armenian king, while their plant in the Roman army was ordered to lead Crassus around the desert aimlessly. Just to make sure that the Romans did not link up with the Armenians, 10,000 Parthian cavalry were sent south to further harass the legions.

But it would turn out that the attempt to delay Crassus would prove to be far more successful than anyone could have dreamed. The 10,000 cavalry was about to crush Crassus' army of some 40,000.

After being led away from the Euphrates, the Roman army marched day after day through the sweltering desert heat. Morale was low, and the troops grumbled that Crassus had no idea what he was doing, no idea where he was going, and that he was going to get them all killed. On all three fronts, they were exactly correct.

At Keri, near the modern border of Syria and Turkey, the Parthian cavalry appeared on the horizon. Hearing advice from his officers about where to fight, when to fight, and how to fight, Crassus ordered his exhausted troops to form into a giant square, with cavalry protecting each wing. At first, the Romans, despite their misgivings about Crassus, were fairly confident. It was, after all, only 10,000 Parthians.

But of those, 9,000 were highly mobile and highly accurate archers, while the other 1,000 were heavily armored troops called cataphracts. The Parthian light cavalry opened up the attack. They would charge the Romans at full speed, firing arrows the whole time. Then, as soon as they got near the line, they would wheel around and speed off, continuing to fire arrows over their shoulders as they went. This last maneuver was called a Parthian shot, or, as we know it today, a parting shot. They had the effect of never letting up on the constant barrage of arrows.

Crassus kept his men in formation, shields facing all directions, and the arrows mostly bounced off harmlessly. But as I'm sure you can imagine, the constant attack took its toll mentally. Crassus' brilliant strategy was to simply outlast the arrow supply of the Parthians, and hope they would leave the Romans alone after that.

At one point, however, afraid that he would be surrounded, Crassus ordered his son to lead out the Celtic cavalry to drive off an encircling force. The superior Parthian cavalry, however, led Publius and his men far away from the main Roman force, then suddenly wheeled around and attacked. Helpless, Crassus watched as his cavalry and his son were slaughtered.

Despondent, he fumbled around trying to decide what to do next, eventually coming to the conclusion that he needed to march forward and attack. But before he could make any positive move, the armored cataphracts attacked. The exhausted and heat-stroked Roman front line was smashed, and the whole army was split in two. Crassus was forced to order a retreat. Ten thousand of his men were cut off from the rest of the army and cut down.

The Romans withdrew, but were led astray again and again by supposedly friendly locals. Finally, the Parthian commander sent word that he would talk terms with Crassus. The Roman soldiers basically told their general to go talk or they would kill him where he stood. Crassus, completely deflated, agreed. He entered the Parthian camp to discuss peace, but whether by design or accident, a fight broke out and in the melee, Crassus was killed.

Legend has it that the Parthians, well aware that they were dealing with Rome's richest and greediest leader, poured molten gold down his throat and kept the skull as a trophy. The legions, meanwhile, discovered that they had been led into a swamp and, getting word that their leader had been murdered, tried to escape, but the flight was a disaster. Between the battle at Cary and the retreats, Rome lost some 20,000 troops, with another 10,000 taken prisoner. Of the 40,000 who had marched out just weeks before, only 10,000 limped back to Syria under the command of Gaius Cassius. Yeah, that Cassius.

It was the worst Roman defeat since the disaster at Cannae during the Second Punic War, and more embarrassing than the loss itself was the capture of numerous legionary eagle standards. It was a source of almost immeasurable shame for the legionary symbols to fall into the hands of the enemy. Caesar Augustus spent a great deal of diplomatic time and energy trying to recover the captured eagles from the Parthians, and when he finally got them back, the reaction in Rome was the same as if he had actually won a great battle.

The defeat at Cary also firmly solidified in the minds of most Romans that it was folly to try and expand further east. Many had opposed Crassus' mission to begin with, and took the loss as proof that Rome ought to stick near the Mediterranean. Marc Antony's later disastrous misadventures in the region would further drive home the point that sound policy was living in peaceful coexistence with whatever empire controlled the mountains and deserts of the east. It was not until the Emperor Trajan some 150 years later that Rome would again risk war in the east, and even then, Trajan's successor Hadrian basically abandoned all the territory Trajan had won, deeming it far too expensive to try and hold. Rome was, and would remain, a Mediterranean empire.

I will also mention in passing that to the Romans at the time, the doomed campaign in the east was defined not by the death of Marcus Crassus, but by the death of his son Publius. The young man, too young to even begin his path on the cursus honorum, had already proved himself to be a great leader while serving in the Gallic Wars, and many Romans felt that the early death of this popular and charismatic leader was one of the great tragedies of the day. It is intriguing to wonder what role a formidable Publius Crassus would have played in the coming civil wars.

But for Caesar, the death of Marcus was still by far the greater tragedy. It had the effect of officially ending the first triumvirate. With Julia's death in 54 BC, the ties that bound Caesar and Pompey were already strained. Crassus' death officially ended the partnership.

Caesar, as I mentioned before, attempted to salvage the relationship by offering Pompey his niece Octavia, but Pompey decided to marry Publius Crassus' young widow, who just so happened to be the daughter of one of Caesar's greatest enemies, Quintus Metellus Scipio. Yes, the triumvirate was broken.

Beyond this breach, Roman general began to turn on Caesar. In December of 53 BC, a chance passing in the streets of Clodius and Melo led to a fight breaking out among their entourages. In the scuffle, Clodius was killed. This not only deprived Caesar of a key ally in the city, but it also sparked a wave of riots.

In a display of shocking lawlessness, the supporters of Clodius actually seized control of the Senate house and used it as a funeral pyre for their dead leader, burning the entire structure to the ground. So when you go to Rome and visit the Forum and discover to your disappointment that you can't actually see the spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated because the Senate was meeting somewhere else for a few years, blame Clodius. Well, at least his supporters. Boo, Clodius' supporters, boo.

The riots led the Senate to reach out to Pompey. A strong hand was needed before things spun out of control. But wary of giving Pompey full dictatorial powers, they instead split the difference and appointed him emergency consul without a colleague. Pompey managed to restore order, but moving beyond the immediate crisis, the Senate pushed him to deal with the next crisis, which they all saw looming.

Caesar had just emerged completely victorious in the Gallic Wars and was sitting in Gaul with 50,000 battle-hardened veterans. The Senate was itching to strip Caesar of his command and punish him for all the terrible things he had done, real or imagined. But obviously, Caesar wasn't just going to roll over, so a tense showdown began, with both sides refusing to blink.

Pompey pushed the envelope first by passing a law allowing for retroactive prosecution for bribery, putting the Senate on firm legal footing to go after Caesar when he returned to Rome. Next, the Senate demanded that Caesar stand down his legions now that, by his own admission, the war in Gaul was won. Caesar countered this by saying that that was fine as long as he was allowed to stand for consular election in absentia.

Pompey responded by answering that no, he would not be granted any such concession, and further, he would not be allowed to stand for election at all unless his army was disbanded. Caesar said that that was fine, he would give up his army as soon as Pompey gave up his. But as Pompey's army was slowly but surely transforming into the army of the Republic, the Senate refused to let Pompey agree to these terms.

They demanded Caesar disband his army or he would be declared an enemy of the state. Here then was the final break. Despite the best efforts of Cicero and the other moderates, the two sides had dug themselves in too deep. There was no way Caesar was coming back to Rome without the protection of either his army or the imperium that came with the consulship, and the Senate was not going to let him have either of those things.

For the winter of 50 BC, Caesar considered his options. The personal feud between himself and the Senate had now grown into a full-blown constitutional crisis, and there was no way of knowing what the outcome of any given decision he made would be. Should he try to broker a deal through Cicero, recognize that he was outnumbered and capitulate, or should he just go all in and march back to Rome with his army? Next week, I think we all know what Caesar decides to do.