Preface. After fossils decline, we go back to wood as our main thermal source of energy for cooking, heating, smelting metals, ceramics, bricks, glass and other products that need the high heat of wood charcoal.
Sadly, another source of energy is likely to be slavery. I’ve extracted the parts of Holland’s “Rubicon” that dealt with slavery below.
And added on parts I found of interest about how children were raised and other aspects of Roman life I hadn’t read elsewhere.
Other collapses:
Bardi (2021) How Resource Depletion Leads to Collapse. The Story of a Lost Kingdom. The Garamantes were a North-African civilization that grew at the time of the Roman Empire, powerful enough that the Romans built a system of fortifications to defend their possessions on the coast. But the Garamantes ran out of their water resources where they prospered by means of a sophisticated irrigation system using non-renewable fossil water from underground aquifers in the Sahara. After extracting at least 30 billion gallons of water over some 600 years, the 4th-century A.D. Garamantes found their water was running out. To deal with the problem, they would have needed to add more man-made underground tributaries to existing tunnels and dig additional deeper, much longer water-extraction tunnels. To do that, they would have needed vastly more slaves than they had. The water difficulties must have led to food shortages, population reductions, and political instability (local defensive structures from this era may be evidence for political fragmentation). Conquering more territories and pulling in more slaves was therefore simply not militarily feasible. The magic equation between population and military and economic power on the one hand and slave-acquisition capability and water extraction on the other no longer balanced. The desert kingdom declined and fractured into small chiefdoms and was absorbed into the emerging Islamic world.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report
* * *
Tom Holland. 2005. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Anchor.
It would have been hard for the rebels not to have been overwhelmed by the discovery of just how many other slaves there were in Italy. Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of conquest. The single market established by Roman supremacy had enabled captives to be moved around the Mediterranean as easily as any other form of merchandize, and the result had been a vast boom in the slave trade, a transplanting of populations without precedent in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been uprooted from their homelands and brought to the center of the empire, there to toil for their new masters.
Even the poorest citizen might own a slave.
in the countryside, where conditions were at their worst. Gangs were bought wholesale, branded, and shackled, then set to labor from dawn until dusk. At night they would be locked up in huge, crowded barracks. Not a shred of privacy or dignity was permitted them. They were fed the barest minimum required to keep them alive.
Exhaustion was remedied by the whip, while insubordination would be handled by private contractors who specialized in the torture—and sometimes execution—of uppity slaves. The crippled or prematurely aged could expect to be cast aside, like diseased cattle or shattered wine jars. It hardly mattered to their masters whether they survived or starved. After all, as Roman agriculturalists liked to remind their readers, there was no point in wasting money on useless tools.
This exploitation was what underpinned everything that was noblest about the Republic—its culture of citizenship, its passion for freedom, its dread of disgrace and shame. It was not merely that the leisure that enabled a citizen to devote himself to the Republic was dependent on the forced labor of others. Slaves also satisfied a subtler, more baneful need. “Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.” so every Roman took for granted. All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave. Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.
It was a logic that slaves accepted too. No one ever objected to the hierarchy of free and un-free, merely his own position within it. What the rebels wanted was not to destroy slavery as an institution, but to win the privileges of their former masters.
GLADIATORS
That midsummer of 73 there was a breakout from a gladiatorial school in Campania.
such schools had become increasingly big business in the region. Gladiators were very much a homegrown speciality.
Even as the rituals of blood-spilling began to be commercialized by a growing Roman interest in them, gladiators continued to dress in the style of Samnite warriors, complete with brimmed helmets and ungainly, bobbing crests. As time went by and Samnite independence faded into history, so the appearance of these fighters came to seem ever more exotic—like that of animals preserved from extinction in a zoo. To the Romans themselves, the whiff of the foreign that clung to gladiatorial combat was always a crucial part of its appeal. As the Republic’s wars became ever more distant from Italy, so it was feared that the martial character of the people might start to fade. In 105 BC the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies—if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls.
But the carnage also served as a deadly warning. Gladiatorial combat was evidence of what might happen once the spirit of competition was given free rein, once men started to fight each other not as Romans, bound by the restraints of custom and obligation, but as brutes. Blood on the sand, corpses dragged away on hooks. Should the frameworks of the Republic collapse, as they had almost done during the years of civil war, then such
It might be the fate of everyone, citizen as well as slave. Here, then, was another reason why the training schools tended to be concentrated in Campania, at a safe distance from Rome. The Romans could recognize the savagery in the soul of the gladiator and feared to have it harbored it in their midst. In the summer of 73, even though the number on the run was well below a hundred, the Romans still sent a praetor to deal with them, along with an army of three thousand men. The fugitives having taken refuge on the slopes of Vesuvius, the Romans settled down to starve them out. Gladiators, however, knew all about lunging at an opponent’s weak spot. Finding the slopes of the volcano covered with wild vines, they wove ladders out of the tendrils, then descended a precipice and attacked the Romans in the rear. The camp was captured, the legionaries routed. The gladiators were immediately joined by further runaways. Leg irons were melted down and forged into swords. Wild horses were captured and trained, a cavalry unit formed. Spilling out across Campania, the slaves began to pillage a region only just starting to recover from Sulla’s depredations. Nola was besieged yet again, and looted. Two further Roman armies were routed. Another praetor’s camp was stormed.
What had begun as a makeshift guerrilla force was now forming itself into a huge and disciplined army of some 120,000 men. Credit for this belonged to the leader of the original breakout, a Thracian named Spartacus. Before his enslavement he had served the Romans as a mercenary, and combined the physique of a gladiator with shrewdness and sophistication. He recognized that if the rebels stayed in Italy, it would be only a matter of time before their outraged masters annihilated them, so in the spring of 72 he and his army began to head for the Alps. They were pursued by Gellius Publicola, the humorist whose joking at the expense of Athenian philosophers had so amused his friends years before, and who had just been elected to the consulship. Before he could engage with Spartacus, however, the slaves met with the Roman forces stationed to guard the northern frontier, and destroyed them. The route over the Alps, and to freedom, now stood wide open. But the slaves refused to take it. Instead, meeting and brushing aside Gellius’s army, they retraced their steps southward, back toward the heartlands of their masters and everything they had previously been attempting to escape.
SPARTACUS
Only Spartacus himself appears to have fought for a genuine ideal. Uniquely among the leaders of slave revolts in the ancient world, he attempted to impose a form of egalitarianism on his followers, banning them from holding gold and silver and sharing out their loot on an equal basis. If this was an attempt at Utopia, however, it failed. The opportunities for violent freebooting were simply too tempting for most of the rebels to resist. Here, the Romans believed, was another explanation for the slaves’ failure to escape while they had the chance. What were the bogs and forests of their homelands compared to the temptations of Italy? The rebels’ dreams of freedom came a poor second to their greed for plunder. To the Romans, this was conclusive evidence of their “servile nature.” In fact, the slaves were only aiming to live as their masters did, off the produce and labor of others. Even on the rampage they continued to hold a mirror up to Roman ideals.
It was no wonder that the Romans themselves, who could recognize efficient looting when they saw it, should have begun to panic.
After a furious debate the consuls were stripped of their two legions, and Crassus was awarded sole command. The new generalissimo immediately launched a recruiting drive, quadrupling the size of the forces at his disposal. Having won the chance to establish himself as the savior of the Republic, he did not intend to waste it.
When two of his legions, in direct contradiction of his orders, engaged with Spartacus and suffered yet another defeat, Crassus’s response was to resurrect the ancient and terrible punishment of decimation. Every tenth man was beaten to death, the obedient along with the disobedient, the brave along with the cowardly, while their fellows were forced to watch. Military discipline was reimposed. At the same time, a warning was sent to any slaves tempted to join Spartacus that they could expect no mercy from a general prepared to impose such sanctions on his own men. Ruthless as Crassus was, he never did anything without a fine calculation of its effect. At a single brutal stroke the property-grubbing millionaire had transformed his image into that of the stern upholder of old-fashioned values. As Crassus would have been perfectly aware, the traditions of Roman discipline always played well with the voters.
Spartacus made a third attempt to force the barricades. This time he broke free. Fleeing Crassus, he began to zigzag northward. Crassus, with one eye on the rebels and the other on the ever-nearing Pompey, followed him at a frantic speed, picking off stragglers in a series of escalating clashes. At last the rebels were cornered again, and Spartacus turned and prepared to fight. Ahead of his marshaled men, he stabbed his horse, spurning the possibility of further retreat, pledging himself to victory or death. Then the slaves advanced into battle. Spartacus himself led a desperate charge against Crassus’s headquarters, but he was killed before he could reach it. The vast bulk of the rebels’ army perished alongside their general. The great slave uprising was over. Crassus had saved the Republic.
Except that, at the very last minute, his glory was snatched from him. As Pompey headed south with his legions toward Rome he met with five thousand of the rebels, fugitives from Spartacus’s final defeat. With brisk efficiency he slaughtered every last one, then wrote to the Senate, boasting of his achievement in finishing off the revolt. Crassus’s feelings can only be imagined. In an attempt to counteract Pompey’s glory-hogging he ordered all the prisoners he had captured to be crucified along the Appian Way. For more than a hundred miles, along Italy’s busiest road, a cross with the body of a slave nailed to it stood every forty yards, gruesome billboards advertising Crassus’s victory.
To most Romans, however, the war against Spartacus had been an embarrassment. Compared to Pompey’s achievement in slaughtering thousands of tribesmen in a far-off provincial war, Crassus’s rescue act in Rome’s backyard was something to forget. This is why, even though both men were voted laurel wreaths, Crassus had to be satisfied with a second-class parade, touring the streets of Rome not in a chariot but on foot. No pavement-pounding for Pompey, of course. Nothing but the best for the people’s hero. While Pompey, preening like a young Alexander, rode in a chariot pulled by four white horses, his trains of loot and prisoners snaking ahead of him through the streets, his adoring fans going wild, Crassus could only watch, and fume.
There were also powerful interest groups in Rome that positively encouraged inactivity. The more that the economy was glutted with slaves, the more dependent it became on them. Even when the Republic was not at war, this addiction still had to be fed. The pirates were the most consistent suppliers. At the great free port of Delos it was said that up to ten thousand slaves might be exchanged in a single day. The proceeds of this staggering volume of trade fatted pirate captain and Roman plutocrat alike. To the business lobby, profit talked louder than disrespect.
the Senate had long been in bed with the business classes. It was for this reason, perhaps, that the most farsighted critic of the Republic’s hunger for human livestock was not a Roman at all, but a Greek. Posidonius, the philosopher who had celebrated the Republic’s empire as the coming of a universal state, recognized in the monstrous scale of slavery the dark side of his optimistic vision. During his travels he had seen Syrians toiling in Spanish mines, and Gauls in chain gangs on Sicilian estates. He was shocked by the inhuman conditions he had witnessed. Naturally, it never crossed his mind to oppose slavery as an institution. What did horrify him, however, was the brutalizing of millions upon millions and the danger that this posed to all his high hopes for Rome. If the Republic, rather than staying true to the aristocratic ideals that Posidonius so admired, permitted its global mission to be corrupted by big business, then he feared that its empire would degenerate into a free-for-all of anarchy and greed. Rome’s supremacy, rather than heralding a golden age, might portend a universal darkness. Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world. As an example of what he feared, Posidonius pointed to a series of slave revolts, of which that of Spartacus had been merely the most recent. He might just as well have cited the pirates. Bandits, like their prey, were most likely to be fugitives from the misery of the times, from extortion, warfare, and social breakdown. The result, across the Mediterranean, wherever men from different cultures had been thrown together, whether in slave barracks or on pirate ships, was a desperate yearning for the very apocalypse so feared by Posidonius. Rootlessness and suffering served to wither the worship of traditional gods, but it provided a fertile breeding ground for mystery cults. Like the Sibyl’s prophecies, these tended to be a fusion of many different influences: Greek, Persian, and Jewish beliefs. By their nature, they were underground and fluid, invisible to those who wrote history—but one of them, at least, was to leave a permanent mark.
Mithras, whose rites the pirates celebrated, was to end up worshiped throughout the Roman Empire, but his cult was first practiced by the enemies of Rome. Mysterious threads of association bound him to Mithridates, whose very name meant “given by Mithra.” Mithras himself had originally been a Persian deity, but in the form worshiped by the pirates he most resembled Perseus, a Greek hero, and one from whom Mithridates, significantly, claimed descent. Perseus, like Mithridates, had been a mighty king, uniting West and East, Greece and Persia, orders far more ancient than the upstart rule of Rome. On Mithridates’ coinage there appeared a crescent and a star, the ancient symbol of the Greek hero’s sword. This same sword could be seen in the hand of Mithras, plunging deep into the chest of a giant bull.
The alliance between the pirates and Mithridates, which was very close, went far beyond mere expediency. And what is equally certain is that the pirates, preoccupied with plunder as they were, also saw themselves as the enemies of everything embodied by Rome. No opportunity was wasted to trample on the Republic’s ideals. If a prisoner was discovered to be a Roman citizen, the pirates would first pretend to be terrified of him, groveling at his feet and dressing him in his toga; only when he was wearing the symbol of his citizenship would they lower a ladder into the sea and invite him to swim back home. Raiding parties would deliberately target Roman magistrates and carry off the symbols of their power.
Roman business, having sponsored a monster, now began to find itself menaced by its own creation. The pirates’ growing command of the sea enabled them to throttle the shipping lanes. The supply of everything, from slaves to grain, duly dried to a trickle, and Rome began to starve. Still the Senate hesitated.
***
And a few other bits of interest about the Roman Empire
In their relations with their fellows, then, the citizens of the Republic were schooled to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. In their relations with other states, however, no such inhibitions cramped them. “More than any other nation, the Romans have sought out glory and been greedy for praise.” The consequences for their neighbors of this hunger for honor were invariably devastating. The legions’ combination of efficiency and ruthlessness was something for which few opponents found themselves prepared. When the Romans were compelled by defiance to take a city by storm, it was their practice to slaughter every living creature they found. Rubble left behind by the legionaries could always be distinguished by the way in which severed dogs’ heads or the dismembered limbs of cattle would lie strewn among the human corpses. The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine.
The Romans lacked a specific word for “baby,” reflecting their assumption that a child was never too young to be toughened up. Newborns were swaddled tightly to mold them into the form of adults, their features were kneaded and pummelled, and boys would have their foreskins yanked to make them stretch. Old-fashioned Republican morality and newfangled Greek medicine united to prescribe a savage regime of dieting and cold baths. The result of this harsh upbringing was to contribute further to an already devastating infant mortality rate. It has been estimated that only two out of three children survived their first year, and that under 50% went on to reach puberty. The deaths of children were constant factors of family life. Parents were encouraged to respond to such losses with flinty calm. The younger the child, the less emotion would be shown, so that it was a commonplace to argue that “if an infant dies in its cradle, then its death ought not even be mourned.” Yet reserve did not necessarily spell indifference. There is plenty of evidence from tombstones, poetry, and private correspondence to suggest the depth of love that Roman parents could feel.
Caesar’s upbringing was famously strict, and his mother, Aurelia, was accordingly remembered by subsequent generations of Romans as a model parent; so model, in fact, that it was said she had breastfed her children. This, notoriously, was something that upper-class women rarely chose to do, despite it being their civic duty, since, as everyone knew, milk was imbued with the character of the woman who supplied it.
The Romans believed that girls had to be molded just as much as boys. Physical as well as intellectual exercises were prescribed for both. A boy trained his body for warfare, a girl for childbirth, but both were pushed to the point of exhaustion. To the Romans, self-knowledge came from appreciating the limits of one’s endurance. It was only by testing what these might be that a child could be prepared for adult life.
No wonder that Roman children appear to have had little time for play. Far fewer toys have been found dating from the Republic than from the period that followed its collapse, when the pressure to raise good citizens had begun to decline. Even so, children were children: “As they grow older, not even the threat of punishment can keep them from playing games with all the energy they have.” Girls certainly had their dolls, since it was the custom to dedicate these to Venus as part of the rituals of marriage. Boys, meanwhile, played obsessively with spinning tops. Dice appear to have been a universal mania. At wedding parties the groom would be expected to toss children coins or nuts that could then be played for as stakes.
Smoke from sacrifices to the gods continued to rise above the seven hills, just as it had done back in far-off times, when trees “of every kind” had completely covered one of the hills, the Aventine. Forests had long since vanished from Rome, and if the city’s altars still sent smoke wreathing into the sky, then so too did a countless multitude of hearth-fires, furnaces, and workshops. Long before the city itself could be seen, a distant haze of brown would forewarn the traveler that he was nearing the great city. Nor was smog the only sign.
Nobility was perpetuated not by blood but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. If he failed to gain a senior magistracy or—worse—lost membership of the Senate altogether, a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only “to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all.
Marius, of course, provided the great example of a commoner made good. If it were sufficiently dashing, a military career might well provide a new man with both glory and loot. All the same, it was hard for anyone without contacts to win a command. Rome had no military academy. Staff officers were generally young aristocrats adept at pulling strings. Caesar would never have had the opportunity to win his civic crown had he not been a patrician. Even once it had been obtained, a military posting could bring its own problems. Lengthy campaigns, of the kind that might win a new man spectacular glory, would also keep him away from Rome. No one on the make could afford a long-term leave of absence. Ambitious novices in the political game would generally serve their time with the legions, and maybe even win some honorable scars, but few made their names that way. That was usually left to established members of the nobility. Instead, for the new man, the likeliest career path to triumph in the Cursus, to the ultimate glory of the consulship, and to seeing himself and his descendants join the ranks of the elite was the law.
In Rome this was a topic of consuming interest. Citizens knew that their legal system was what defined them and guaranteed their rights. Understandably, they were intensely proud of it. Law was the only intellectual activity that they felt entitled them to sneer at the Greeks. It gratified the Romans to no end to point out how “incredibly muddled—almost verging on the ridiculous—other legal systems are compared to [their] own!”16 In childhood, boys would train their minds for the practice of law with the same single-minded intensity they brought to the training of their bodies for warfare. In adulthood, legal practice was the one civilian profession that a senator regarded as worthy of his dignity. This was because law was not something distinct from political life but an often lethal extension of it. There was no state-run prosecution service. Instead, all cases had to be brought privately, making it a simple matter for feuds to find a vent in the courts. The prosecution of a rival might well prove a knockout blow. Officially the penalty for a defendant found guilty of a serious crime was death. In practice, because the Republic had no police force or prison system, a condemned man would be permitted to slip away into exile, and even live in luxury, if he had succeeded in squirreling away his portable wealth in time. His political career, however, would be over. Not only were criminals stripped of their citizenship, but they could be killed with impunity if they ever set foot back in Italy. Every Roman who entered the Cursus had to be aware that this might be his fate. Only if he won a magistracy would he be immune from the prosecutions of his rivals, and even then only for the period of his office. The moment it ended his enemies could pounce. Bribery, intimidation, the shameless pulling of strings—anything would be attempted to avoid a prosecution. If it did come to the law courts, then no trick would be too low, no muck-raking too vicious, no slander too cruel. Even more than an election, a trial was a fight to the death.
To the Romans, with their inveterate addiction to passionate and sensational rivalries, this made the law a thrilling spectator sport. Courts were open to the general public. Two permanent tribunals stood in the Forum, and other temporary platforms might be thrown up as circumstance required. As a result, the discerning enthusiast always had a wide choice of trials from which to choose. Orators could gauge their standing by their audience share. This only encouraged the histrionics that were already part and parcel of a Roman trial. Close attention to the minutiae of statutes was regarded as the pettifogging strategy of a second-class mind, since everyone knew that only “those who fail to make the grade as an orator resort to the study of the law.” Eloquence was the true measure of forensic talent. The ability to seduce a crowd, spectators as well as jurors and judges, to make them laugh or cry, to entertain them with a comedy routine or tug at their heart strings, to persuade them and dazzle them and make them see the world anew, this was the art of a great law-court pleader. It was said that a Roman would rather lose a friend than an opportunity for a joke. Conversely, he felt not the slightest embarrassment at displays of wild emotion. Defendants would be told to wear mourning clothes and look as haggard as they could. Relatives would periodically burst into tears. Marius, we are told, wept to such effect at the trial of one of his friends that the jurors and the presiding magistrate all joined in and promptly voted for the defendant to be freed.
Rome’s leading orator in the decade following Sulla’s death, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, was notorious for aping the gestures of a mime artist. Like Caesar, he was a celebrated fop, who “would arrange the folds of his toga with great care and exactness,” then use his hands and the sweep of his arms as extensions of his voice. He did this with such grace that the stars of the Roman stage would stand in the audience whenever he spoke, studying and copying his every gesture. Like actors, orators were celebrities, gaped at and gossiped about. Hortensius himself was nicknamed “Dionysia” after a famous dancing girl, but he could afford to brush all such insults aside. The prestige he won as Rome’s leading orator was worth any number of jeers.
***
The armies of the Republic had not always been filled with penniless volunteers. When the citizens assembled for elections on the Campus Martius, ranked strictly according to their wealth, they were preserving the memory of a time when men of every class had been drafted, when a legion had indeed embodied the Republic at war. Ironically, in those nostalgically remembered days, only those without property had been excluded from the levy. This had reflected deeply held prejudices: among the Romans, it was received wisdom that “men who have their roots in the land make the bravest and toughest soldiers.” The horny-handed peasant, tending to his small plot, was the object of much sentimental attachment and patriotic pride. Unsurprisingly, for the Republic had become great on his back. For centuries the all-conquering Roman infantry had consisted of yeoman farmers, their swords cleaned of chaff, their plows left behind, following their magistrates obediently to war. For as long as Rome’s power had been confined to Italy, campaigns had been of manageably short duration. But with the expansion of the Republic’s interests overseas, they had lengthened, often into years. During a soldier’s absence, his property might become easy prey. Small farms had been increasingly swallowed up by the rich. In place of a tapestry of fields and vineyards worked by free men, great stretches of Italy had been given over to vast estates, filled with chain gangs—
In 107 Marius had bowed to the inevitable: the army was opened to every citizen, regardless of whether he owned property or not. Weapons and armor had begun to be supplied by the state. The legions had turned professional. From that moment on, possession of a farm was no longer the qualification for military service, but the reward. This was why, when the first mutterings of mutiny began to be heard in the winter of 68, the whispers were all of how Pompey’s veterans, merely for fighting rebels and slaves, were already “settled down with wives and children, in possession of fertile land.” Lucullus, by contrast, was starving his men of loot. The charge was patently untrue—Tigranocerta had fallen and been plundered only the previous year—but it was widely believed.
***
Capture by pirates had recently become something of an occupational hazard for Roman aristocrats. Eight years previously Julius Caesar had been abducted while en route to Molon’s finishing school. When the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar had indignantly claimed that he was worth at least fifty. He had also warned his captors that he would capture and crucify them once he had been released, a promise that he had duly fulfilled. Clodius’s own dealings with pirates were to contribute less flatteringly to his reputation. When he wrote to the king of Egypt demanding the ransom fee, the response was a derisory payment of two talents, to the immense amusement of the pirates and the fury of the captive himself. The final circumstances of Clodius’s release were lost in a murk of scandal. His enemies—of whom there were many—claimed that the price had been his anal virginity.
Whatever the rewards it was capable of bringing them, however, kidnapping was only a sideline for the pirates. Calculated acts of intimidation ensured that they could extort and rob almost at will, inland as well as at sea. The scale of their plundering was matched by their pretensions. Their chiefs “claimed for themselves the status of kings and tyrants, and for their men, that of soldiers, believing that if they pooled their resources, they would be invincible.” In the nakedness of their greed, and in their desire to make the whole world their prey, there was more than a parody of the Republic itself, a ghostly mirror image that the Romans found unsettling in the extreme. The shadowiness of the pirates’ organization, and their diffuse operations, made them a foe unlike any other. “The pirate is not bound by the rules of war, but is the common enemy of everyone,” Cicero complained. “There can be no trusting him, no attempt to bind him with mutually agreed treaties.” How was such an adversary ever to be pinned down, let alone eradicated? To make the attempt would be to fight against phantoms. “It would be an unprecedented war, fought without rules, in a fog”; a war that appeared without promise of an end. Yet for a people who prided themselves on their refusal to tolerate disrespect, this was a policy of unusual defeatism. It was true that the rocky inlets of Cilicia and the mountain fastnesses that stretched beyond them were almost impossible to police. The area had always been bandit country. Ironically, however, it was Rome’s very supremacy in the east that had enabled the pirates to swarm far beyond their strongholds. By hamstringing every regional power that might pose a threat to its interests and yet refusing to shoulder the burden of direct administration, the Republic had left the field clear for the triumph of brigandage. To people racked by the twin plagues of political impotence and lawlessness, the pirates had at least brought the order of the protection racket. Some towns paid tribute to them, others offered harbors. With each year that passed the pirates’ tentacles extended farther.
***
Nothing was more scandalous to the Romans than a reputation for enjoying haute cuisine. Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence. Back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook “had been the least valuable of slaves,” but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than “he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art.” In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial. The Senate, alarmed, had accordingly attempted to restrain it. As early as 169 the serving of dormice at dinner parties had been banned, and later Sulla himself, in a fine show of hypocrisy, had rushed through similar laws in favor of cheap, homely fare. All mere dams of sand. Faddishness swept all before it. Increasingly, millionaires were tempted to join their cooks in the kitchens, trying out their own recipes, sampling ever more outlandish dishes. This was the crest of the wave that Sergius Orata had ridden to such lucrative effect, but oysters did not lack for rivals in the culinary stakes. Scallops, fatted hares, the vulvas of sows, all came suddenly and wildly into vogue, and all for the same reason: for in the softness of a flesh that threatened rapid putrescence yet still retained its succulence the Roman food snob took an ecstatic joy.
Most treasured, most relished, most savored of all, were fish. So it had always been. The Romans had been stocking lakes with spawn for as long as their city had been standing. By the third century BC Rome had come to be ringed by ponds. Freshwater fish, however, because so much easier to catch, were far less prized than species found only in the sea—and as Roman gastronomy grew ever more exotic, so these became the focus of intensest desire. Rather than remain dependent on tradesmen for their supply of turbot or eel, the super-rich began to construct saltwater ponds. Naturally, the prodigious expense required to maintain these only added to their appeal.
***
Roman nostalgia for the countryside cut across every social boundary. Even the most luxurious of villas also served as farms. Inevitably, among the urban elite, this tended to encourage a form of playacting that Marie-Antoinette might have recognized. A favorite affectation was to build couches in a villa’s fruit store. A particularly shameless host, if he could not be bothered to grow and harvest his own fruit, might transport supplies from Rome, then arrange them prettily in his store for the delectation of his guests. Pisciculture had a similarly unreal quality. Self-sufficiency in fish came at a staggering price. As agriculturalists were quick to point out, homemade lakes “are more appealing to the eye than to the purse, which they tend to empty rather than fill. They are expensive to build, expensive to stock, expensive to maintain.
In pisciculture, as in every other form of extravagance, however, it was Lucullus who set the most dazzling standards of notoriety. His fishponds were universally acknowledged to be wonders, and scandals, of the age. To keep them supplied with salt water, he had tunnels driven through mountains; and to regulate the cooling effect of the tides, groynes built far out into the sea. The talents that had once been devoted to the service of the Republic could not have been more spectacularly, or provocatively, squandered.
***
A city that indulged a dance culture was one on the point of catastrophe. Cicero could even claim, with a perfectly straight face, that it had been the ruin of Greece. “Back in the old days,” he thundered, “the Greeks used to stamp down on that kind of thing. They recognized the potential deadliness of the plague, how it would gradually rot the minds of its citizens with pernicious manias and ideas, and then, all at once, bring about a city’s total collapse.” By the standards of that diagnosis, Rome was in peril indeed. To the party set, the mark of a good night out, and the city’s cutting-edge craze, was to become ecstatically drunk and then, to the accompaniment of “shouts and screams, the whooping of girls and deafening music,” to strip naked and dance wildly on tables.
Roman politicians had always been divided more by style than by issues of policy. The increasing extravagance of Rome’s party scene served to polarize them even further. Clearly, it was an excruciating embarrassment for traditionalists that so many of their standard bearers had themselves succumbed to the temptations of luxury: men such as Lucullus and Hortensius were ill placed to wag the finger at anyone.
***
It was a deliberate tactic on Cato’s part to make his enemies, in comparison to his own imposing example, appear all the more vicious and effeminate. Chasing after women and staying out drunk were not expressions of machismo to the Romans; the very opposite, in fact. Indulgence threatened potency.
their togas had the texture and transparency of veils, and they wore them, in a much-repeated phrase, “loosely belted.” This, of course, was precisely how Julius Caesar had dressed in the previous decade. It is a revealing correspondence. In the sixties as in the seventies, Caesar continued to blaze a trail as the most fashionable man in Rome. He spent money as he wore his toga, with a nonchalant flamboyance. His most dandyish stunt was to commission a villa in the countryside and then, the moment it had been built, tear it down for not measuring up to his exacting standards. Extravagance such as this led many of his rivals to despise him. Yet Caesar was laying down stakes in a high-risk game. To be the darling of the smart set was no idle thing. The risk, of course, was that it might result in ruin—not merely financial, but political too. It was noted by his shrewder enemies, however, that he never let his partying put his health at risk. His eating habits were as frugal as Cato’s. He rarely drank. If his sexual appetites were notorious, then he was careful to choose his long-term partners with a cool and searching caution.
***
Early every December women from the noblest families in the Republic would gather to celebrate the mysterious rites of the Good Goddess. The festival was strictly off-limits to men. Even their statues had to be veiled for the occasion. Such secrecy fueled any number of prurient male fantasies. Every citizen knew that women were depraved and promiscuous by nature. Surely a festival from which men were banned had to be a scene of lubricious abandon? Not that any male had ever dared take a peek to confirm this thrilling suspicion. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of Roman religion that even those who sniggered at it also tended to regard it with awe. Men, just as much as women, honored the Good Goddess.
The mansion began to fill with incense, music, and great ladies. Now, for a few brief hours, it was the city’s women who held the safety of Rome in their hands. There was no longer any call for them to skulk in the shadows, afraid of prying eyes. Yet one of Aurelia’s maids, looking for some music, observed a flute-girl who was doing exactly that. She approached her; the flute-girl shrank away. When the maid demanded to know who she was, the flute-girl shook her head, then mumbled Pompeia’s name. The maid shrieked. Dressed in a long-sleeved tunic and breastband the stranger might have been, but the voice had been unmistakably male. Uproar ensued. Aurelia, frantically covering up the sacred statues of the goddess, suspended the rites. The other women went in search of the impious intruder. They finally found him, hidden in the room of one of Pompeia’s maids. Off came the veil of the bogus flute-girl to reveal … Clodius.
Gossip convulsed the city.
Clodius, by dressing up in women’s clothes and gate-crashing a sacred ritual, had clearly taken offensiveness to a whole new level. Overnight he became the toast of every loose-belted dandy and the bogey of every conservative in Rome. Caught in the middle, deeply embarrassed by the affair, was Caesar. Naturally, he had to affect outrage. Not only had Clodius violated the pontifical house, but it was also rumored that he had been planning to violate Pompeia herself. Cuckolded Roman husbands had been known to set their slaves on adulterers, to beat them, rape them, even castrate them; at the very least Caesar would have been justified in dragging Clodius through the courts. But the pontifex had an image problem: despite his elevated religious status, he remained a topic of fevered gossip himself, the rake who had been labeled “a man for every woman, and a woman for every man.”28 For Caesar to adopt the tone of the moral majority might open him to even greater ridicule, quite apart from making an enemy of Clodius and alienating the fast set who were his natural supporters. After all, he was planning to run for the consulship within a couple of years. Clodius was far too well connected, and capricious, to risk offending. In the end Caesar resolved his dilemma by divorcing Pompeia but refusing to say why: “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”29 was his single, Delphic comment. Then, before anyone could press him further, he slipped away to Spain, where he was due to serve as governor. It was a measure of his eagerness to be away from Rome that he arrived in his new province before the Senate had even had time to confirm his appointment. Caesar’s departure did nothing to dim the obsession with the scandal. The continuing hysteria that surrounded Clodius’s stunt submerged even the news of Pompey’s arrival.