The Book of Ancient Bastards (11 page)

With Friends Like These . . . .

(CA. 138–78 B.C.)

No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.
—Epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix

Born in 138 B.C. to a patrician family long on pedigree and short on money, Lucius Cornelius Sulla grew up in a slum with the dregs of Rome for neighbors. Over the course of his life, he would rise to the top of Rome’s political heap, eventually seizing absolute power as dictator, then pulling the greatest escape of any despot in ancient history: dying of natural causes in his own bed.

Sulla came of age in the Roman Subura, a notorious red-light district where his neighbors numbered among them the usual collection of thieves, pimps, hookers, and murderers. While Sulla shared their daily existence, he was exceptional in that he came from a prominent family. On top of that, he was smart enough to get himself the hell out of the Subura as quickly as he could (an inheritance from a rich, older girlfriend didn’t hurt). He held a number of public offices that family connections helped him secure and demonstrated a talent for administration and courage while leading troops.

By the time of the Jugurthine War (against a former Roman ally in North Africa), Sulla had become the right-hand man of fellow upstart bastard Marius, making a name for himself in the bargain. In no time at all the two men were rivals, with the older Marius ever more jealous of Sulla’s successes.

The result? Civil war.

What Marius had started by making legionaries into professional soldiers loyal to the generals who paid them rather than to the empire, Sulla further advanced by using his army to besiege Rome, destroying the Roman Republic in everything but name, the culmination of which would be Sulla’s appointment as dictator in 82 B.C.

Until that point, Sulla and Marius (and their supporters) jockeyed relentlessly for power, killing off each other’s supporters (using a political tool called “proscriptions,” in which people considered enemies of the state were singled out for execution), seizing their property, and redistributing it among their own followers. These newly enriched followers were so many dragon’s teeth sown without much thought to the consequences of their coming to power: names like Cinna and Crassus, Pompey and Catiline would plague the Republic with their squabbling over who would succeed Sulla.

Before he retired, Sulla had the opportunity to have one of these young bucks put to death but was persuaded to spare the young man’s life. In his memoirs, he later expressed regret for having spared the young man in question. “In this Caesar,” he wrote, “there are many Mariuses.”

It takes a bastard to know a bastard.

Bastard’s Circus

During his entire life, Sulla never forgot where he came from. Even when he had reached the pinnacle of power as dictator representing the interests of the conservative
optimates
political party, Sulla liked to party, to drink, to carouse, and he didn’t like to keep company with stuffy senators and their wives. Instead, he did his drinking with the lowlifes he’d met during his upbringing in the Subura. In fact, when Sulla retired to his country villa, he took his favorite “girlfriend” with him: a female impersonator named Metrobius!

A Confederacy of Dunces?

(108–62 B.C.)

Lucius Catiline . . . had great mental and physical energy, but his abilities were perverted and destructive. From his boyhood he had reveled in civil war, murder, robbery, and public discord. . . . His boundless ambition was constantly directed towards wildly fantastic and unattainable ends. After the dictatorship of Sulla he was possessed by a tremendous urge to seize control of the government and he did not in the least mind what methods he used, provided he obtained supreme power.
—Sallust, Catiline

Lucius Sergius Catiline was descended from one of Rome’s most distinguished old families. Like his fellow bastard Julius Caesar, Catiline entered adulthood broke. And like many other young Roman aristocrats who refused to curtail their lifestyles to fit a budget during the first century B.C., Catiline soon found himself swimming in debt. Catiline threw his support behind fellow bastard Sulla, and as a result made a fortune dabbling in property sold at auction during that dictator’s proscriptions. In one notorious case, Catiline killed his brother-in-law, hacked off his head, and carried it to the Forum, where he got Sulla to add the poor unfortunate’s name to the proscription lists after the fact, then received the man’s property in the bargain!

In the end, Catiline attempted a coup to topple the existing Roman state and install him as dictator.

Like such contemporaries as Cicero and Pompey, Catiline seems to have been impatient with the Roman system of advancement through long government service. Where the others cut a corner here and there (Cicero skimping on military service, Pompey on civil positions), Catiline seemed ready to toss the entire playbook.

He began conspiring to bypass the senate and seize power as his benefactor Sulla had done. In furtherance of this plan, he attracted to him (in the words of the historian Sallust), “Every gambler, libertine or glutton, who had frittered away his inheritance in play, debauchery or entertainment” to whom the notion of having his debts canceled seemed appealing. His co-conspirator Manlius began raising troops in the hinterlands, calling the poor, the debt-ridden, anyone interested in bettering their lot for a march on Rome like the one Sulla had staged twenty years before.

Quotable Bastard

When Catiline ran a fourth time for consul in 62 B.C., he did not simply attempt to win influence in the senate. Like Napoleon and Hitler after him, he took his case straight to the common people. He was quite open about this cynical attempt to use the common people to help him bypass the political process and catapult him to power: “I see two bodies in the state,” he said in a speech shortly before the election of 63 B.C., “One thin and wasted but with a head. The other is headless but large and powerful. What is so dreadful about my becoming head of the body that needs one?”

It was the consul Cicero who finally called Catiline out, exposing him in the senate as the opportunistic rebel he had become. Apprised of Catiline’s attempt at a coup (and intent to murder hundreds of people, including Cicero himself) by an anonymous letter, Cicero stood on the floor of the senate, pointed his finger straight at Catiline and asked, “How long, tell me, will you abuse our patience, O Catiline? How long still will that madness of yours mock us? To what evil end will your unrestrained audacity hurl itself?”

Catiline eventually cracked and fled the city, meeting up with Manlius and his ragtag army and “marching on Rome.” They didn’t get far. Catiline died courageously but futilely in battle against the legionaries that Cicero sent to bring him back to Rome in chains.

Opportunistic bastard.

Lies and the Lying Liar Who Told Them

(? – 84 B.C.)

Cinna went up to the Capitol with a stone in his hand and took the oaths, and then, after praying that if he did not maintain his goodwill towards Sulla, he might be cast out of the city, as the stone from his hand, he threw the stone upon the ground in the sight of many people. But as soon as [Cinna] had entered upon his office, he tried to subvert the existing order of things, and had an impeachment prepared against Sulla.
—Plutarch, The Life of Sulla

The last days of the Roman Republic bred a crop of opportunists the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since the death of Alexander the Great and wouldn’t see again till the Bush administration. In any other era, a bastard like Lucius Cornelius Cinna would have stood out from the crowd. In late republican Rome, his stature was diminished in comparison to that of truly nasty bastards like Marius and Sulla.

Cinna was that most mundane of bastards: a political opportunist with no hard principles save the advancement of his own interests.

Building on the dissatisfaction of noncitizen Italian residents of the Republic, Cinna managed to earn the support of Marius’s powerful rival Sulla as a compromise candidate for consul. But Cinna crawfished on the deal, getting himself stripped of his consulship (the only time this ever happened during Rome’s long history) and exiled, cast out of Rome like the stone he’d thrown the day he took his oath in the Capitol.

Raising an army from among his noncitizen Italian supporters, Cinna invaded Rome, overthrew his fellow consul Octavius (a conservative who opposed him), then threw in openly with Marius. This allowed the old goat to return from exile and begin doling out political payback for grievances real and imaginary.

The result was one of the bloodiest chapters in Roman history, so bloody that Cinna finally decided to put a stop to it. He and his allies ambushed several of Marius’s gangs of slave assassins, killing most of them and bringing Marius’s purge to an abrupt halt. But the damage had been done. This reign of terror would not be the last endured by the city during the succeeding decades.

As for Cinna, you can hardly say that he profited by letting Marius loose on the Roman populace. He continued to intrigue, and for the next three years managed to set himself up as dictator in all but name, until he was murdered by his own supporters in 84 B.C.

Bastard-in-Law

Cinna’s daughter Cornelia was married to one of ancient history’s most famous bastards, a guy named Gaius Julius Caesar. Caesar was also the nephew of Cinna’s political ally, the bloodthirsty Marius. These family connections put Caesar under a death sentence after Cinna was assassinated and Sulla (a political enemy of both men) became dictator a couple of years later. Sulla relented on the death sentence, provided that Caesar cast aside Cornelia and marry someone of the dictator’s choosing. Divorce was common during this era, and it is a testament to Caesar’s character that he refused the deal and went into hiding rather than give his wife up.