Between 70 and 50 BC the Republic solved every one of its practical problems by giving one man powers no Roman had held before, and each solution left him harder to control than the problem had been.
The previous lesson ended with Sulla's settlement dismantled and Italy enfranchised. This one is about the twenty years in which the Republic worked, in the sense that pirates were cleared, Mithridates finished, Gaul conquered and the grain kept flowing, and in which the institutions this course began by describing stopped mattering. The tension between those two statements is the subject.
A career made of exceptions
Take Pompey, whose progress through the constitution is best read as a list of things that could not legally happen.
In 83 BC, aged twenty-three and holding no office, he raised three legions from his father's clients and estates and brought them to Sulla. In 81 or 80 he demanded and received a triumph as a private citizen. In 77 he was given proconsular imperium against Sertorius in Spain, again as a private citizen, on the Senate's own motion. In 71 he stood for the consulship of 70 and won it at the age of 36, six years under the legal minimum, having never been quaestor, aedile or praetor, and while standing outside the city with an army he had not disbanded.
Then came the two commands that mattered. The lex Gabinia of 67 BC gave him a three-year command against the pirates covering the whole Mediterranean and the coasts fifty miles inland, with 500 ships, 120,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, twenty-four legates of praetorian rank and 6,000 talents. In 66 the lex Manilia transferred the war against Mithridates to him with no limit of time or territory, and he spent five years reorganising the entire eastern Mediterranean, founding cities, making kings and settling boundaries, on his own authority.
Example. Set the pirate command against a normal magistrate's resources and say what the difference amounts to.
An ordinary consul commanded two legions, about 10,000 men, for one year, in one assigned province. Pompey received 120,000 infantry, equivalent to about twenty-four legions, for three years, across every province with a coastline, with twenty-four subordinates each of the rank a province would normally have as its governor. The money, 6,000 talents, is about 144 million sesterces, of the same order as the state's entire annual revenue at the time. It is not a magistracy with unusual scope; it is a parallel government of the Mediterranean, created by a vote of the assembly against the opposition of most of the Senate. The tribune who proposed it was following the precedents of 210, 107 and 88 BC, and the scale is what had changed.
Now you. Cicero says that grain prices in Rome fell on the day Pompey's appointment was announced. What does that tell you, and how far should it be trusted?
Answer
It tells you that the market expected the command to work, which is a genuine and unusual piece of evidence about contemporary opinion, since prices are set by people betting their own money rather than making speeches. Trust it with the usual discount: Cicero says it in a speech supporting Pompey's next command, so he is a partisan witness reporting a fact that suited him. The claim is plausible because it is checkable in principle by his audience, who had bought grain that year, and speakers do not invent price movements their hearers can remember. What it does not show is that the appointment was wise constitutionally, which is a different question, and the one the Senate lost.
The money and the muscle
Marcus Licinius Crassus is the second figure, and he is the one usually underrated, because he won no famous battles and his fortune is the least glamorous kind of power.
Crassus made his money out of Sulla's proscriptions, buying confiscated estates cheaply, and enlarged it with urban property, mines and slaves. Plutarch puts his fortune at 7,100 talents, about 170 million sesterces, roughly half the state's annual revenue after Pompey's eastern settlement. What that bought was not soldiers but politicians: Crassus lent money to men on their way up, including Caesar, whose debts he guaranteed, and a creditor of that kind holds a permanent claim on the borrower's career.
He also has the one military achievement of the period that was purely internal. The rising of Spartacus from 73 to 71 BC destroyed several Roman armies before Crassus put it down, and he ended it with a gesture: 6,000 captives crucified along the Via Appia from Capua to Rome.
Example. The Via Appia from Capua to Rome is about 195 km. Work out what 6,000 crosses along it means physically, and what the gesture was for.
Six thousand crosses spread over 195,000 metres is one every 32.5 metres, so a traveller on the main road into Rome from the south passed a crucified man roughly every thirty seconds of walking, for a week. It is not a punishment, since the men were already prisoners and could have been killed anywhere. It is a message addressed to the slave population of Italy, the one the earlier lesson on Italy counted in the hundreds of thousands, and its scale is a measure of how frightened their owners were. Notice also who is speaking: not the Roman state, which passed no decree about it, but a commander disposing of prisoners as he saw fit, in Italy, in a manner designed to be seen. Power of that kind belonged to individuals now.
Now you. Suetonius says Caesar took so much gold from Gaul that he sold it in Italy at 3,000 sesterces the pound against a standard price of 4,000. What can be drawn from that?
Answer
A 25 per cent discount, which implies a quantity large enough to move the price of gold in the Italian market rather than merely to enrich one man. That is the right order of magnitude for what a decade of campaigning in an unplundered country could produce, and it explains the scale of Caesar's political spending in the 50s: the public works, the games, the loans to senators, the doubling of his soldiers' pay. Treat the exact figures as approximate, since Suetonius wrote 170 years later, and treat the direction as solid, because the same effect shows up independently in Caesar's ability to outspend everyone in Rome while absent from it. Conquest was now a business with a return that no domestic career could match.
A private arrangement
In 60 BC three men found that each of them had been blocked by the Senate. Pompey could not get his eastern settlement ratified or land for his veterans. Crassus could not get relief for the tax companies that had overbid for the Asian contract. Caesar, back from Spain, was being forced to choose between a triumph and standing for the consulship.
They agreed to help each other, and the agreement worked: Caesar was elected consul for 59, passed Pompey's settlement and his land bill and Crassus's rebate, and received Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum for five years by a law of the tribune Vatinius, to which the Senate added Transalpine Gaul. In 56 the three renewed the arrangement, and in 55 Pompey and Crassus took a second consulship together and extended Caesar's command by another five years, giving themselves Spain and Syria.
This is what Roman writers called a conspiracy of three men and modern books call the First Triumvirate, and the name is misleading in a way worth being precise about. It was not an office, a magistracy or a legal body of any kind. Three private citizens agreed to combine their votes, their clients, their money and their soldiers, and the Republic's institutions did what they asked. We know about it because Cicero, who was outside it, describes its operation week by week in letters to Atticus that he never expected anyone else to read.
Example. What does the existence of an arrangement like this tell you about the constitution in 59 BC?
That the formal system had become a set of instruments rather than a source of authority. Everything the three men wanted was obtained through proper procedures: a consul proposed, an assembly voted, a law resulted. Nothing was seized. And the decisions were made in private by men whose power came from armies, fortunes and clients, with the assemblies functioning as a ratification stage. That is a hollowed constitution rather than a violated one, and it is much harder to defend against, because there is no moment at which anyone can point and say a law was broken. Cicero spent the decade trying to find such a moment and never did.
Now you. In 52 BC, after months of rioting in which elections could not be held and Clodius was killed on the Appian Way, Pompey was made consul without a colleague. What is odd about that title?
Answer
That it contradicts the office. Collegiality was the first constraint on imperium, the reason there were two consuls at all, and a consul without a colleague is a magistrate with nobody able to veto him, which is what the Republic had been designed since 509 BC to prevent. The Senate chose the formula deliberately to avoid the word dictator, which Sulla had poisoned, and the choice shows the governing class knew exactly what it was doing and preferred an unprecedented consulship to a precedented dictatorship. When the constitution's guardians will suspend its central rule to restore order, the argument that Caesar should be held to the rules has already lost most of its force, and Caesar's supporters said so.
The city while this happened
Rome itself in these years is worth a paragraph, because it explains why so many people preferred a strong man to the alternative.
In 63 BC Cicero, as consul, uncovered a conspiracy by the bankrupt aristocrat Catiline and had five citizens executed without trial under the Senate's final decree, which was legally contested at the time and drove him into exile five years later. From 58 the streets were run by organised gangs: Clodius, a patrician turned tribune with a following among the urban poor, against Milo, backed by the Senate's hard men. Elections were postponed for months at a time, and 53 BC opened with no consuls at all because none could be elected. In January 52 Clodius was killed in a brawl on the Appian Way, his supporters burned the Senate house as his pyre, and it was in the ashes of that building that Pompey received his sole consulship.
A citizen watching this had reason to conclude that the Republic could no longer keep order in one city, let alone an empire.
Why the Republic needed the men it feared
It would be easy to read all this as ambition overwhelming institutions, and that reading is half of it. The other half is that the problems were real and the ordinary machinery could not touch them.
Piracy had made the sea unusable, interrupted the grain that fed Rome, and reached the point where two praetors were carried off with their attendants from the Italian coast. Mithridates had been fought inconclusively for twenty years by a succession of annual commanders, each of whom lost the campaign his predecessor had begun. Spain, Gaul and the east all needed multi-year commitments by forces larger than a consul commanded.
The constitution had exactly one way to supply that: suspend its own rules and give one man a long command with large forces. It did so repeatedly, each time for a good reason, and each time the beneficiary emerged with more soldiers, more money and more clients than any institution could balance. By 50 BC Caesar had spent nine campaigning seasons in Gaul with an army that had grown from four legions to about eleven, all of them recruited, paid and enriched under him.
The Senate's dilemma is genuine. Refusing the commands meant leaving the empire ungoverned; granting them meant creating men it could not control. Nothing in the constitution offered a third option, because it had been designed for a city whose commanders were a week's march away and back in the Forum by the following spring.
Where this leaves the Republic
By 50 BC the arrangement of 60 was dead. Crassus, who had held it together as much as anyone, took an army into Mesopotamia and was destroyed at Carrhae in 53, and Julia, Caesar's daughter and Pompey's wife, had died in childbirth the year before. What remained was two men with armies, no institution able to arbitrate between them, and a legal question that had no honest answer: whether Caesar could stand for a second consulship in his absence, or had to come home as a private citizen and face the prosecutions his enemies had been preparing for a decade.
That question is not really about law, as the next lesson shows. It is about what happens when the rules require a man to make himself defenceless and he has fifty thousand soldiers who would rather he did not.