A Criminal History of Mankind (29 page)

Rome’s progress towards becoming the razor king of the Mediterranean began with setbacks. Rome and Carthage were evenly matched; the war dragged on, and after twenty-four years both sides were exhausted. It was Carthage that sued for peace; but Rome had lost two hundred thousand men and five hundred ships. When the Carthaginian general Hamilcar conquered Spain, Rome was piqued and alarmed to see its old rival back in business, and the two antagonists were soon squaring up again.

This time, Hamilcar’s son Hannibal seized the initiative and invaded Italy across the Alps. For years his successes were brilliant; he beat Roman army after Roman army. Most of southern Italy came over to his side. But the Romans had a bulldog stubbornness. Their general, Fabius - the one after whom the Fabian Society was named - took care to avoid battle, but concentrated on harassing the invaders. Finally, the Roman Scipio carried the war back into North Africa, and Carthage was once again obliged to sue for peace. Rome acquired Spain and settled down to enjoy its new position as master of the Mediterranean.

The last act of the tragedy took place half a century later. Carthage was now a harmless municipality, a city without an empire; the peace treaty with Rome did not even allow her to possess an army. But like many conquered nations, she showed astonishing resilience, and was soon as prosperous as ever. Rome now longed to see her enemy trampled into the dust; one old statesman, Cato, used to conclude all his speeches in the senate - on whatever subject: ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ The trouble was to find a pretext; Carthage was now so obviously harmless. And finally, for lack of anything better, the flimsiest of pretexts had to serve. Carthage’s neighbour, Numidia - an ally of Rome - began making raids, and Carthage had to arm herself. Rome declared that she had broken their treaty and made threatening noises. Like a dog rolling on its back, Carthage offered instant and total obedience, and for a while the Romans thought they were going to be deprived of their war and the rich booty it would bring. So they ordered the Carthaginians to abandon their city and to move ten miles inland - a course that would inevitably destroy a city that depended on the sea for its trade. This had the desired effect of making the Carthaginians angry. Rome was able to declare war.

For an earlier generation of Romans, the conquest of Carthage would have been an easy matter. But things had changed since the last Punic war. Riches had flooded into Rome, permitting unheard-of luxuries - such as taking baths in milk. Political corruption had become commonplace; but the politicians also set out to corrupt the plebs with flattery and amusements. A man who wanted to become a consul had to put on a gladiatorial show costing thousands of pounds; the richer the show, the more likely he was to be elected. The old Romans had had only one festival a year; now there were dozens. The intellectuals read the Greeks, quoted Plato, and cultivated a taste for boy-love. Rich young dandies wore semi-transparent robes and took a pride in their hair-dos. In a mere half-century, Rome had turned into a kind of Sodom.

The result was that the first attack on Carthage was a failure, almost a disaster. The defenders hurled back the attacks, and disease reduced the morale of the Roman besiegers. The second year of war was just as bad, the Romans wasting themselves in attacks on outlying towns. Finally, the Romans appointed a young general named Scipio - grandson of the man who had won the previous war with Carthage - and the fortunes of the Carthaginians took a turn for the worse. Scipio built a mole across the harbour to prevent supplies getting in. Carthage began to starve to death. They took Roman captives on to the walls, tortured them, and hurled them down at the besiegers. The Carthaginians - always given to internal intrigues - began to quarrel among themselves, and men were crucified in the streets. Children were sacrificed to the God Moloch, rolled down into a furnace, to try to avert disaster.

When the Romans assaulted again, the city fell. They hacked their way in, burning houses as they went. The defenders now fought grimly, retreating street by street. They were too weak to resist for long. Even so, it took the Romans six days to reach the citadel, the steep rock in the centre of the town with a temple on its summit. The last of the Carthaginians surrendered. In the temple, nine hundred Roman deserters who knew they could expect no mercy set the temple on fire and died in the flames. The prisoners were sold into slavery, and Carthage was burned to the ground. The senate issued orders that not a stone was to be left standing. When the city was reduced to ashes, the ground was ploughed. Julius Caesar later built another Carthage, but not upon the same spot. The ground that had seen so much agony was accursed. (And the phrase is here meant literally - the Roman priests performed an elaborate ceremony to curse the ground.)

In the same year, 146 B.C., the Romans intervened in a quarrel between Greeks - who regarded themselves as Rome’s allies - and treated the city of Corinth as they had treated Carthage, levelling it to the ground, cursing the site and selling all its citizens into slavery. A few years later, when the province of Lusitania, in western Spain, rebelled against Roman occupation, its city of Numantia was wiped off the face of the map and its citizens massacred or sold into slavery. None of these acts of terrorism was necessary. But Rome was trying to make up in violence what it lacked in strength and discipline.

The trouble was that Rome was becoming fat, lazy and vicious. A few Romans of the old school warned against the danger; but the majority of their fellow citizens simply could not see what they were talking about. Rome had overrun the Mediterranean; it had even added Macedonia, the country of Alexander the Great, to its conquests. Wealth was flooding in from all sides. Everyone benefited; the plebs were always being given free hand-outs and treated to public spectacles in which captives had to fight for their lives against lions and tigers. They were not going to complain about the increasing power of the rich so long as the rich kept them so well entertained. In a city as wealthy as Rome, there was plenty for everyone.

What worried men like Tiberius Gracchus - another grandson of the great Scipio Africanus - and his brother Gaius, was that most of the wealth and land was passing into the hands of a few people, and that these were mostly corrupt. Rome’s greatness had been founded on small farmers who owned their own land; such men might have a few slaves, but these were treated almost as members of the family. And now, just as in the time of Marcus Manlius, soldiers returning from the war were being jailed for debt and the small farms were being gobbled up by the wealthy landowners. These new super-farms were being stocked with slaves by Mediterranean pirates, and the cheap grain was putting the remaining small farmers out of business. The fields were full of chained slaves who were branded like cattle. Naturally, these escaped whenever they could, and went around committing robbery and murder until they were caught and tortured to death. When the Sicilian slaves revolted, in 134 B.C., seventy thousand of them took over the island. The Romans finally had to kill the lot. A happy and contented land was turning into a land of suffering and crime.

In the year of the slave revolt in Sicily, Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune of the people. And his first act was to propose a law to limit the amount of land that could be held by a single family. He suggested too that land should be given to homeless soldiers. This was too much. His fellow senators rose up against him, chased him into the street, and beat him to death with table legs. Ten years later, his brother Gaius - another ‘troublemaker’ - was murdered under almost identical circumstances.

The Romans were slipping into violence by a process of self-justification. And once a nation - or an individual - has started down this particular slope, it is almost impossible to apply the brakes. The Roman people were too unimaginative and short-sighted to realise that, once murder has been justified on grounds of expediency, it can become a habit, then a disease.

The man who was most responsible for bringing the disease to Rome was not a criminal or degenerate; in fact, he possessed all the Roman virtues. Gaius Marius was the son of a farm labourer; he rose to eminence in the army, married a patrician girl, and succeeded in getting himself elected tribune - a spokesman of the people. He was in his mid-forties when an African general named Jugurtha rose up in revolt. Jugurtha’s skill in guerrilla warfare enabled him to defy the might of Rome for four years. Finally, Marius marched off to try his luck. He soon decided to abandon force in favour of treachery. Jugurtha’s father-in-law was bribed to betray him, and lure him into a trap laid by a brilliant young officer known as ‘Lucky Sulla’. Marius was able to keep his promise to drag Jugurtha back to Rome in chains. The angry populace tore off the captive’s jewels and clothes, yanking the ear-rings so violently that they ripped off the flesh. Jugurtha was thrown into an icy dungeon and executed a few days later. Marius became the most popular man in Rome, and was awarded a triumph.

Rome undoubtedly needed Marius. Barbarian invaders, including Germans (making their first appearance in history), poured in from the north. A Roman army had been virtually wiped out at Arausio, on the Rhone - the most shattering defeat since Hannibal. Marius was hastily despatched to meet them as they poured into Italy. Fortunately, the barbarians had divided their forces. Marius drove the Teutons back into Aix en Provence, where he annihilated them; then he caught up with the other half, the Cimbri, and routed them at Vercellae, near Milan.

Once again, he was the hero of Rome. He was elected consul for the sixth time in succession - a glorious but illegal achievement, since each of the two consuls - who were together virtually governors of Rome - was only supposed to serve for a year at a time. He joined forces with two popular demagogues, Saturninus and Glaucia, and set out to topple the conservatives and make himself master of Rome. Unfortunately, his talents as a politician were mediocre - his manners were too blunt and harsh. He tried intriguing with both sides at once and lost his friends and allies in the process. The planned ‘revolution’ was a total failure; riots broke out and, as consul, Marius was forced to call out the army against his former allies. They took refuge in the Capitol and were murdered by a mob. Suddenly, the ‘saviour of Rome’ found himself a political has-been. It had all happened so quickly - within a month or two of his victorious return - that he found it difficult to grasp. He had always had an imperious temper; now he became suspicious and paranoid.

But the conservatives had also overreached themselves. There really
was
an urgent need for reform - not just in Rome but in the whole of Italy. The people needed champions to defend them against the wealthy; but as soon as a champion appeared, he was murdered. When this happened to a reformer named Drusus - another ‘leftist’ -Italy flared into civil war. Once again, Marius was needed. He and his old subordinate ‘Lucky Sulla’ - now his bitter rival - were placed in command of the armies and marched off to slaughter men who had once fought under them - mostly dissatisfied Italians who felt they had a right to become Roman citizens. At this point, a king named Mithridates of Pontus - on the Black Sea - decided to seize this opportunity to acquire himself an empire. He invaded Syria and Asia Minor and sent out secret orders that all Romans living in conquered cities should be put to death. When the day came, more than a hundred thousand men, women and children were dragged out into the streets and massacred.

The people of Rome were shattered by the news - it seemed incredible that Romans could be treated like the inhabitants of Carthage and Corinth - mere cattle. The rich were even more shaken by loss of revenues. The treasury was suddenly empty. The senate decided that, instead of slaughtering the Italians, it might be a better idea to give them what they wanted and then send them to fight Mithridates. So the Italians finally achieved their Roman citizenship.

It might be assumed that, in the face of the Asian threat, Rome would cease its internal squabbles. But the Romans had become too accustomed to quarrelling amongst themselves. To begin with, Marius and Sulla both thought they ought to have the honour of destroying Mithridates. The senate preferred the patrician Sulla. Marius threw in his lot with a popular demagogue named Sulpicius, who appealed directly to the people. They not only voted him command of the army; they also went off looking for Sulla to tear him to pieces. Sulla had to flee from Rome. But he fled to his soldiers - the ones who had helped him to put down the rebellion - and marched on Rome. After some bitter fighting, it was Marius’s turn to flee, together with his friend Sulpicius, who was caught and executed while Marius escaped to Africa. Having settled this little quarrel, Sulla made himself master of Rome, murdered a few hundred of Marius’s supporters, passed some laws, and finally marched off to fight Mithridates.

The moment his back was turned, Marius hurried back to Rome. Paranoid, vengeful, eaten up with jealousy and hatred, he behaved like a maniac. Like Sulla, he had his faithful army - his soldiers liked to call themselves ‘Marius’s mules’ - and he now began a reign of terror such as no great city had ever seen. He had the gates of Rome closed, then ordered his men to kill all his ‘enemies’ - that is, anyone against whom he nursed a grudge. And since a paranoid has a grudge against half the world, thousands of Rome’s most distinguished men died in those few days. When Marius walked through the streets, men hastened to salute him. If Marius looked the other way, it was a sign that the man was one of his enemies, and his soldiers cut him down on the spot.

Marius had become insane, a victim of his own obsessions. Soon he began to find it impossible to sleep, even though he drank himself into a stupor every night. And after being elected consul for the seventh time he fell into a fever and died. All Italy heaved a sigh of relief.

But his death brought no deliverance. When Sulla arrived back in Rome - after forcing Mithridates to make peace - he murdered as many of Marius’s supporters as he could find. Another reign of terror began. Senators and officials were killed by the thousand. And very shortly, the murders ceased to be purely political. For, as all dictators have discovered, it is hard to see the difference between a man you dislike for political reasons and a man you just happen to find dislikeable. After a while, it is not even necessary to dislike a man in order to kill him. If he has a desirable estate, and you want it for one of your friends, it seems natural to regard its owner as a tiresome obstacle. Beginning as the ‘liberator’ of Rome, Sulla ended as its first dictator in the modern sense.