The Republic vs. The Empire Builders

The battle for the fate of the Roman Republic was on.

On one side were the empire-builders: Julius Caesar and his right-hand man Marc Antony (and sickly little Octavian in the next tent), Pompey the Great, and Marcus Crassus, who wanted to be great himself but never quite got there.

On the other side were Marcus Tullius Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator, consul in 63 BC, dictator during the Catiline Conspiracy, and all-around clever guy. At his side was Rome’s greatest conservative and champion of ancient ideals, Cato the Younger.

They also had in their corner—at least on paper--the cowardly Roman Senate, but being cowardly--and venal--the Senate was always kind of a moving target. They could be bought and they could be intimidated, and the empire-builders had money and soldiers to burn.

It was a contest between military power, which the Romans had always admired, and republican traditions, which the Romans had always revered. But the citizens of the republic saw their ideals go to the Senate house to die more often than not, and might be willing to take a chance on a smooth operator like Caesar, who claimed to be a staunch defender of the republic even as he quietly dismantled it.

Cicero and Cato had their work cut out for them.

(If you'd rather listen than read, check out this episode of the History's Trainwrecks Podcast):

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The remaining conspirators from Catiline’s rebellion had been executed without trial—at Cato’s urging and Cicero’s sly manipulation (and over the objections of Julius Caesar, who may or may not have been involved), but that didn’t end the undercurrent of turmoil that had given rise to Catiline’s revolt. The poor were going deep into debt to survive. The rich were exploiting the downtrodden to gain property and supporters whose loyalty stemmed more from a financial obligation or desperate situation than actual support or belief in a cause.

The legions had gone from fighting Rome’s most feared enemies to engaging in conquest for profit, and they didn’t see much of the profit. Soldiers leaving the service found themselves in as much debt as their fellow citizens. The Senate was populated by entitled aristocrats who seemed more out of touch with the average citizen each day.

Dysfunctional politics. A distant and out-of-touch aristocracy. Expanding poverty. Lower classes who became more desperate as time went on.

What we have here are the ingredients for collapse.

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Cato the Younger, riding high from his recent showdown with Julius Caesar, Man of The People, took steps to undercut Caesar’s popularity by increasing the free grain dole. Rome had provided a regular daily ration of grain to the city’s population for decades. In a time when the biggest question for a poor person was “What am I going to eat today?” or “Am I going to eat today?” the grain dole was a necessary relief. Increasing it would help diffuse unrest among Rome’s poor, and with any luck, transfer their allegiance to the leader giving away the bread part of the bread and circuses.

If you’ve been following along, the grain dole isn’t exactly the kind of thing Cato and Cicero would normally be in favor of. When Cato had been in charge of Rome’s Treasury, he had pinched the Republic’s pennies pretty hard. Giving out more free stuff was not really in his nature.

But Cato (and his fellow small-r republicans) found themselves living in times when every day was a choice between evils. Free grain meant peace, if not quiet, and held populists like Julius Caesar at bay.

One day at a time, Cato. One day at a time.

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Cato’s troubles got worse with the news that Rome’s most famous living general, Pompey the Great, was slouching his way from Bethlehem (where he had gotten Judea to offer an annual tribute to Rome) toward the Eternal City. He expected a hero’s welcome, having finally disposed of the scary King Mithridates (or at least been around when Mithridates was disposed of by a revolt), turned Syria into a lucrative Roman province, and had taken the legions as far as Arabia.

He wanted a triumph, the parade of glory thrown for conquering generals when they came back home with loot and victory. He also wanted to run for consul, the other thing victorious military leaders did. So Pompey faced two competing desires. According to Roman law and tradition, he could only have one at a time.

In order to run for consul, he had to be present in the city. But once he set foot inside Rome, he was, essentially, no longer a general, since Rome forbade a military presence within its walls. If he showed up to run for consul, he would lose his ticker tape parade.

And there was no guarantee he would win. He had already been consul once, and multiple consulships were considered “a dangerous accumulation of power.” Being elected in absentia was “highly irregular.”

Pompey would have to choose between a triumph and a consulship, or find a way to change the law.

So he tried to change the law. He had one of his associates, Nepos, sponsor a bill that would allow him to be elected consul without entering the city, so he could have his triumph and a consulship too. The feeling in the city at the time was such that someone as universally respected as Pompey could reassert firm control after the depredations of Catiline and the machinations of Cicero.

Julius Caesar was on Pompey’s side, happy for a chance to stick it to Cato. The conservatives of Rome met the night before the vote on Nepos’s bill, knowing that “Caesar and Nepos were preparing to perpetrate an outrage,” but had no idea how to stop them. Plutarch wrote that “great dejection and fear reigned,” but that Cato “conversed fearlessly and confidently with all, and comforted them.”

Cato marched to the Forum the next morning, where the assembly was already debating the bill with Caesar and Nepos presiding. The steps were blocked by hired tough guys and gladiators. Cato called out, so that Caesar could hear him, “What a bold man—and what a coward—to send a whole army against a single unarmed, defenseless person.”

The guards let him through.

As tribune, Cato had the power to veto any legislation. As Nepos started to read his bill, Cato shouted “veto!” after each word. A fight broke out, and at one point Cato stood alone while the crowd threw rocks at him. He was pulled to safety by none other than Murena, the consul he had prosecuted for bribery at the height of the Catiline conspiracy.

The bill didn’t pass. The Senate passed a resolution of its own saying that the law wouldn’t be changed for the sake of one man. Nepos fled to the safety of Pompey’s army, where he had to explain how Cato had managed to beat him in spite of popular support and a “favorable political climate.” Julius Caesar resigned his praetorship in protest of the outcome.

Pompey and Caesar realized yet again that Cato the Younger was not to be trifled with.

However, Cato had done himself some long-term damage. His inflexible commitment to republican ideals had put him at odds with the masses, undoing the gains he had made by expanding the grain dole. He was now seen as being firmly on the side of the Roman establishment, which drove the people back to Caesar.

Cato was at a disadvantage when pitted against men who didn’t see the world in black and white terms like he did. This was the case when Cicero had made him the prosecutor in Murena’s bribery trial in order to have the appearance that justice was being done, and it played out again when a mob rioted in order to reinstate Caesar to the post he had just resigned. Caesar, modestly, told the crowd to go home. When the Senate heard of his restraint, they reappointed him to the post he had just quit.

Pompey came back to Rome, disbanded his army, and made his way alone toward the city. “Having spent years playing Alexander, he was Cincinnatus again, the image of the citizen-soldier.” Pompey and Caesar were masters at public relations in all the ways Cato was not.

Pompey tried again to get the laws changed so that he could run for consul without setting foot in the city. He needed both the consulship for legitimate power and the triumph to sway the masses to his side, thereby stealing Caesar’s thunder.

Cato, now a recognized leader of the conservatives, was able to block Pompey again. The Senate had gone to great lengths—from the trial of Murena to the execution of Catiline’s cohorts—to prove that no man was above the law. Were they going to fold now, Cato asked, for a general who couldn’t seem to make up his mind between a day of spectacle and a year of governing?

Pompey, in his way calmer and more savvy than Caesar, figured out that getting Cato on his side was the wisest long-term course of action. He sent a messenger with an interesting proposal—literally.

He offered to marry Cato’s daughter.

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Making political alliances by way of strategic matrimony was common in the Roman Republic. It was a good way to combine familial wealth and power, as well as broker peace with a potential rival. Pompey had used this tactic before, when he had married the stepdaughter of Cornelius Sulla, purported dictator for life.

Here was yet another moment where Cato’s inflexibility did not help him. He told the messenger, “Tell Pompey that Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s rooms.”

In short, Cato would only join forces with someone he agreed with in principle. He saw the marriage alliance only from Pompey’s perspective—as a way to neutralize Cato’s opposition—instead of the ways in which it might help Cato’s own cause. He might have been able to prevail on their new familial connection to bring Pompey over to the side of the conservatives, which would have deprived the aspiring populist Julius Caesar of a crucial partner on his road to dominance.

Like his great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, he had painted himself into a corner. He had been warning the Senate for a long time about the power Pompey wielded and the dangerous consequences that might unfold when he returned victorious from the East. Cato always feared another Sulla, and might have been jumping at shadows in believing that Pompey would automatically parlay his successes into a bloody dictatorship.

In his defense, it had happened before. Within the last twenty years. But with all of Cato’s historical and vocal opposition to Pompey, a sudden marriage alliance would have made him out to be a hypocrite.

When you’re an inflexible stick in the mud like the Catos, this thought is unbearable. He had no army or list of military victories. He wasn’t a skilled orator or wily politician like Cicero. All he had was his legendary integrity, and he didn’t want to lose it.

So Pompey went off and married the daughter of Julius Caesar, paving the way for the First Triumvirate, and the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.

Plutarch, normally a big fan of Cato the Younger, didn’t pull any punches:

“If we are to judge by the results, it would seem that Cato was wholly wrong in not accepting the marriage connection, instead allowing Pompey to turn to Caesar and contract a marriage that united the power of the two men, nearly overthrew the Roman state, and destroyed the constitution. None of these things might have happened, had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all…”

Pompey Magnus got his triumph, riding through the streets of the city, “dressed like a king,” wearing a cloak that had been Mithridates’ and, it was said, Alexander the Great’s. He didn’t get his consulship that year, but he had enough unofficial power, thanks to his reputation and his new alliance with Caesar, that he didn’t need it.

Hopefully, Cato had learned a lesson about strategic priorities.

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Sadly, not for nothing do we call Cato the Younger a stubborn nag. For his next trick, he opposed yet another potential ally that he should have been courting. He and Cicero fell out over a contract before the Senate regarding tax collection.

Rome raised its revenue by way of tax farmers, who bid on the job of tax collecting for the Republic by agreeing to provide a set amount of money. If they collected more, they profited. If they collected less, they were still obligated to pay the full amount to the Treasury.

The Senate likely saw this as a win-win situation for them. But in late 61 BC, the tax farmers realized there was less money to be had from the citizens and the provinces of Rome. The war against Mithridates had drained the provinces of resources, and drought had damaged the harvests. The tax farmers, or publicani, were about to lose money unless they could contract with the state for a much lower amount than usual.

Cicero pushed to accept the lower number, as the alternative was likely worse. When forced to decide between “less” and “nothing,” Cicero the pragmatist would take less and live to fight another day. Cato, inflexible as always, used his influence to shut down all business in the Senate until the tax contract was resolved. Eventually the publicani said that if Cato insisted upon holding them to a contract that they could not fulfill, then they would just walk away, depriving Rome of revenue from the provinces it had just expensively conquered.

In order to get the tax farming contract in the first place, the publicani had to front ?the money to the Treasury, then get it back—with profit—by way of harsh collection practices. At this time, a huge backer of the publicani was Marcus Crassus, Rome’s richest man. By scuttling the tax contract, Cato had also managed to deprive Crassus of significant income.

If you’re keeping score, Cato the Younger had, in the space of a few short years, alienated the most powerful men in the Republic: Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.

And he was just getting started.

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Julius Caesar was on a path to power that he saw very clearly: victory on the battlefield followed by a consulship to lend him official, state-sanctioned power, and the love and might of Rome’s masses. He wanted to combine these things into putting himself at the apex of the Roman state and then proceed with all the reforms and empire-building he had been planning for years.

Cato the Younger stood firmly in his way. So he had to go.