Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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      It was a spectacle that boded ill for republican liberty, but for the time being Cato’s dark forebodings of civil war and dictatorship were not realized. Pompey, for all his magnificence, was still a republican. In Asia he had repudiated Nepos. Now he dismissed his army and re-entered Rome as a private citizen apparently intent on seeking a legitimate channel for his power. It was not his ambition but Cato’s absolute refusal to allow any concession to be made to him that rendered that impossible.

      Doggedly disobliging, implacably opposed to the slightest modification of a political system which, like Sophocles’ tree, looked doomed to break if it would not bend, Cato obstructed Pompey’s every manoeuvre. It was Cato who persuaded the Senate not to postpone the consular elections so that Pompey might stand for office. It was Cato who vociferously opposed the ratification of Pompey’s settlements in the East. And it was Cato who spoke loudest against the bill whereby Pompey sought to reward his veterans for their victories with plots of publicly owned land. Pompey attempted to dissolve this thorn in his flesh by proposing a double marriage, with himself and his son as bridegrooms to Cato’s nieces (or perhaps his daughters), further evidence of the astonishingly high regard in which this still comparatively junior politician was held. Cato refused, saying ‘Tell Pompey that Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.’ Once again, in rejecting an opportunity to bind Pompey to the constitutionalist faction, he had done his own cause a grave disservice.

      He did it another one when he antagonized Crassus. A consortium of tax farmers had paid too high for the right to raise money in Asia Minor. Unable to make a profit, they attempted to renegotiate their contract with the Senate. Crassus backed them. Cato opposed them with manic obduracy. Talking indefatigably for day after day, he succeeded in blocking the measure for months on end, effectively paralysing the Senate by the sheer power of his obstinate will.

      In 60 BC Julius Caesar, who had been campaigning in Spain, also returned to Rome. He had been granted a triumph for his Iberian conquests, but in order to celebrate it he was obliged to remain outside the sacrosanct bounds of the city. However, he wished (as Pompey had done) to be elected consul for the following year, and in order to declare his candidacy he had to be in Rome. He asked the Senate’s permission to stand for office in absentia. Cato opposed him. A decision had to be reached before nightfall on a certain day. Once more Cato filibustered, haranguing his colleagues in his powerful, rasping voice until the sun went down. The next morning Caesar laid aside his command, thus giving up his triumph, and entered the city to seek election.

      Rome’s three most powerful men had each found that, thanks to Cato’s intransigence, they were unable to impose their will on the Senate. They resolved instead to ignore it. In 60 BC Pompey, Caesar and Crassus arrived at a secret agreement (known as the First Triumvirate) that made them the effective, though unacknowledged, rulers of Rome, their combined wealth, manpower and political influence allowing them to bypass or overrule all the institutions of government.

      Cato was outraged. Over the next four years, in the face of political intimidation that frequently escalated into violence, he unswervingly opposed the incremental growth of the power of Rome’s inordinately great men. Every time a rule was bent, a precedent ignored, an extraordinary privilege granted, he was there to oppose the innovation. Tireless and tiresome in equal measure, ‘always ready’, as Theodor Mommsen wrote, ‘to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not’, he let nothing pass. When Caesar became consul in 59 BC Cato obstructed and opposed his every move.

      One of Caesar’s proposals was another bill granting land to Pompey’s soldiers. Pompey brought his veterans – the very men who would benefit from the measure – into the city, a tacit threat to anyone inclined to oppose its passage. A time limit was set for the Senate’s discussion. Few – nervously aware of the armed men thronging the streets around them – dared speak at all; but when it came to Cato’s turn he rose and, employing his favourite tactic, attempted to block the measure by speaking for hours on end. This time, though, he had an opponent with scant respect for senatorial procedure. Caesar’s gang of gladiators dragged him from the rostrum and hauled him off to the very prison cells where Catiline’s co-conspirators had been done to death. As Cato was hustled away, he continued to harangue the senators. Several followed him ‘with downcast looks’. Caesar called them back, demanding they finish the business in hand. One bravely replied: ‘I prefer to be with Cato in prison rather than here with you.’ Cato was marched across the Forum, still talking at the top of his powerful voice to the shocked and fearful crowd. He was released almost immediately, but his imprisonment was a crucial turning point in the history of the Republic, the moment when Caesar demonstrated that he would have his way, with or without the law.

      There were more ugly scenes. When his ineffectual fellow-consul Bibulus (Cato’s son-in-law and ally) attempted to speak against him, Caesar had him and Cato thrown down the steps of the Temple of Castor. They were pelted with dung and Bibulus’ fasces, the emblems of his authority, were broken and thrown after him. There was little Cato could do in the face of such intimidation. Pompey, who had wished to be Cato’s son-in-law, became Caesar’s instead, marrying the consul’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years his junior. Caesar proposed a second land law. It was passed, for all Cato’s protests, the people seeming as entranced by Caesar’s glamour as the Athenians had been by Alcibiades’ (or perhaps they were just afraid of his enforcers). So was the one granting Caesar Gaul and Illyria for his provinces once his consulate lapsed, not for the usual one-year term, but for five years. A few years later Horace was to advise a poet wishing to represent Achilles, ‘Let him deny that the law was made for him.’ Caesar, bending every rule, ignoring every precedent, was acting with an Achillean disdain for legality. As the people gathered in the Forum to vote Cato addressed them with desperate vehemence, warning ‘that they themselves were establishing a tyrant in their citadel’. They voted the measure through regardless.

      Caesar boasted at the end of his consulate that he had got everything he wanted to the accompaniment of his opponents’ groans: now he was free to dance on their heads. He departed for Gaul, having first contrived the election as tribune for the following year of his protégé Clodius, the man who was to plunge Rome into a state of such anarchy that, in Cicero’s words, ‘the blood that streamed from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges’. Clodius, whose personal name was Pulcher, ‘Beautiful’, dominated the circle of young aristocrats against whom Sallust railed for their ‘lewdness’ and ‘luxury’, their total lack of reverence for gods or man-made institutions. A blasphemer and sexual transgressor like Alcibiades, Clodius had – famously – disguised himself and gained entry to the secret festival of the Bona Dea, a women’s rite from which men were rigorously excluded. He was a womanizer whose lovers were said to include his own sister, Clodia, and Caesar’s wife. He was also, as the events of the next six years were to show, a brilliant political organizer, a charismatic demagogue and a man of dangerously unpredictable allegiance capable of turning savagely on magnates who had complacently imagined themselves to be manipulating him.

      Immediately he took office he legalized the previously outlawed collegia, institutions that were part trade unions, part neighbourhood self-defence groups and part political clubs, and set about transforming them into units of street-fighting men. Owing their new legitimacy to him, the collegia became Clodius’ own instruments, making him, whether in or out of office, the warlord of the streets. First, though, he had to rid himself of those few public figures with the nerve and integrity to oppose him. He had Cicero sent into exile on the pretext that the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators had been illegal. Cato (without whom those executions would not have taken СКАЧАТЬ