Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
disastrous food shortages, the acceptance even by a moderate like Cicero that only an armed potentate could save the disordered state – the situation to which Cato returned was the fulfilment of his direst predictions. At once he resumed his old task – that of preventing the great men becoming greater.
Caesar, Pompey and Crassus renewed their pact. Pompey and Crassus were standing together for election as the next year’s consuls. The constitutionalists in the Senate went into mourning, as though for the death of the Republic, but no one dared stand in opposition to the two magnates until Cato (who was not yet old enough to be eligible himself) persuaded his brother-in-law, Domitius Ahenobarbus, to do so and to declare that, if elected, he would terminate Caesar’s unprecedentedly long command in Gaul. Before dawn on the morning of the election Cato and Domitius went together to the Field of Mars, where voting was to take place. They were set upon in the darkness. Their torchbearer was killed. Cato was wounded in the arm. With furious resolution he tried to persuade Domitius to stand his ground ‘and not to abandon, while they had breath, the struggle in the behalf of liberty which they were waging against the tyrants, who showed plainly how they would use the consular power by making their way to it through such crimes’. His eloquence was futile. Ahenobarbus, less principled, or perhaps just more realistic, abandoned his candidature and took to his heels.
Cato, determined that the Triumvirs should not be unopposed, stood for election as praetor. Pompey and Crassus put up a candidate of their own and set about bribing the electorate in a vote-buying exercise of unprecedented scale and blatancy. On the day of the election Pompey had the Field of Mars surrounded by Milo’s thugs. Those who voted the wrong way could expect to suffer for it. Even so, so great was Cato’s prestige, the first votes declared were for him. Bribery and intimidation having both failed, Pompey invoked the gods. He declared he had heard thunder (though no one else had) and, thunder being a sign of divine displeasure, he cancelled the ballot. His supporters went to work on the voters again (whether with their money or their swords is not recorded). By the time a second vote could be held those who had initially voted for Cato had changed their minds.
Measure by measure the Triumvirs consolidated their power. Pompey and Crassus saw to it that they were assigned, as their proconsular commands, Spain and Syria respectively; they introduced bills allowing them to wage war as and when they saw fit and to levy as many troops as they wished. Pompey, further, had it agreed that he could delegate the government of Spain to his officials while remaining himself near Rome. Each time the people voted in their favour while all but one of the senators, listless in their impotence, allowed the legislation to pass without questioning or comment. The exception, of course, was Cato.
A man whose greatest skill was that of making a nuisance of himself, he let none of these measures pass without a hurly-burly. Time and again Cato forced his way onto the rostrum to harangue the people. Time and again he was manhandled down. He was briefly imprisoned again. Nothing could silence him. Denied the rostrum, he would mount his supporters’ shoulders instead. There was rioting. People were killed. But Pompey and Crassus, unperturbed, proceeded to their most controversial move. They proposed that Caesar’s command in Gaul should be extended for a further five years. This called from Cato a speech of the utmost passion and solemnity. He told Pompey that he had taken Caesar upon his own shoulders ‘and that when he began to feel the burden and to be overcome by it he would neither have the power to put it away nor the strength to bear it longer, and would therefore precipitate himself, burden and all, upon the city’. The prophecy, with its strange and awful image of the two giants, one weighing down upon the other, crushing the state beneath them as they toppled, was remembered by the historians, but in the short term it was as futile as all of Cato’s efforts. Caesar got his extended command.
Cato kept up his attack. He argued in the Senate that Caesar’s aggression against the German and Gallic tribes was not only wicked but illegal: the Senate, which supposedly determined Rome’s foreign policy, had not authorized it. The Gallic war, on which Caesar’s enormous (and still extant) fame was based, constituted a monstrous atrocity, a genocidal war crime carried out in full view of all the world over a period of nearly a decade. Caesar had taken the leaders of two German tribes prisoner when they came to him under terms of truce and then massacred some four hundred thousand of their people. This, fulminated Cato, was an outrage for which the gods would exact retribution. Caesar should be put in chains and handed over to the enemy for just punishment. Until his guilt was expiated, all Rome would be accursed. Legally speaking, Cato was correct; but the people of Rome preferred conquests, however achieved, to a clear conscience. Caesar fought on.
Over the next two years, Cato struggled ever more desperately for the cause of legitimacy. It was like building card houses in a hurricane. In Gaul Caesar, conquering tribe after tribe and carting their treasure away with him, grew ever richer and more powerful. At the end of each campaigning season he returned to the Italian peninsula, bringing some of his legions with him, and established himself in winter quarters near Ravenna, within his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he received visitors from Rome, clients and suitors to whom he dispensed largesse, agents who watched over his interest in the metropolis, candidates begging him to use his power to help them to office. Officially absent, he was nonetheless a drastically destabilizing off-stage presence in the drama of Rome’s politics.
While Caesar’s power grew insidiously, Pompey’s was paraded with superb ostentation. For five years he had been building a theatre of unprecedented size and grandeur on the Field of Mars. In 55 BC he inaugurated it with a series of spectacular shows. There were plays, extravagantly staged. (‘What pleasure is there in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules?’ wrote Cicero, who found the display vulgar.) There was a bloody series of games in which five hundred lions and untold numbers of gladiators were killed. There was an elephant fight (‘a most horrifying spectacle’, says Plutarch), which astonished the crowd. At the end of his consulate Pompey, invested now with the authority and the legal immunity of a pro-consul but declining to leave Rome, withdrew to his villa near the city. There he bided his time while the Republic tore itself to pieces.
Milo’s and Clodius’ gangs (the former apparently sponsored by Pompey, the latter by Caesar, but both in fact running way out of any sponsors’ control) bullied the citizens and battled each other for control of the streets. Meetings of the Senate were cut short for fear of violent interruptions by the mobs that gathered outside the chamber. Gangs of armed slaves burst into the Arena and put a stop to the sacred games. Elections took place, if at all, in an atmosphere of terror. It was apparent that the situation was untenable. ‘The city’, wrote Suetonius, ‘began to roll and heave like the sea before a storm.’
Yet Cato persisted. Mommsen called him a ‘pedantically stiff and half witless cloud-walker’, and certainly, viewed with hindsight, his dogged efforts to reform a political system on the eve of its extinction look absurd. But Cato, and most of his contemporaries, still assumed that the Republic would last for generations to come. To like-minded Romans his resolute campaign to restore it to rectitude looked not stupid, but saintly. Cato ‘stood alone against the vices of a degenerate state’, wrote Seneca. ‘He stayed the fall of the Republic to the utmost that one man’s hand could do.’
His stand did not make him popular. Repeatedly, when he spoke in the Forum, he was jeered by hostile agitators. ‘He fared’, says Plutarch, ‘as fruits do which make their appearance out of season. For as we look upon these with delight and admiration, but do not use them, so the old-fashioned character of Cato … among lives that were corrupted and customs that were debased, enjoyed great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men.’ He was elected praetor on the second attempt and brought in a law banning bribery and requiring all candidates for office to submit full accounts of their election expenses. That year’s candidates acquiesced on condition that Cato himself (the only man who could be trusted with the job) would act as their umpire; but the electors, accustomed to being paid for their votes, were outraged by the notion that they should