The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In 68 B.C., Pompey and his supporters persuaded the people of Rome that something had to be done, even if it cost thousands of talents. The following year, Pompey raised 120,000 men, 270 ships, and 6,000 talents (about six million pounds). He knew which towns were pirate strongholds. It was a matter of attacking them all at once so that the pirates could not co-operate or reinforce one another. He had been given three years to complete his task. He struck so suddenly and violently that he completed half of it in the first forty days. The Romans were poor seamen, but it turned out that this made no difference. The pirates fled into their strongholds as soon as the Romans appeared on the horizon, and then Roman soldiers poured on shore and drove them out. These murderers and robbers were no match for trained Roman legions; and when the word got around that Pompey would be merciful to all who surrendered, they gave up by the thousand. Mithridates of Pontus, who had supported the pirates of Cilicia, watched in dismay as the strongholds crumbled. Twenty thousand pirates were captured, ten thousand killed, and all their strongholds and shipyards destroyed. Then, instead of crucifying his captives, Pompey resettled them in some of the abandoned towns, knowing that most of them would settle down to earning a respectable living when given the chance. He proved to be correct. In three months, Pompey put an end to Mediterranean piracy.

After this triumph the Roman people were convinced that Pompey was irresistible, so they sent him with an army to Asia Minor to finish off Mithridates, who was now being more troublesome than ever – encouraging his son-in-law Tigranes to annex Syria and Cappadocia. Pompey captured Tigranes, and pursued Mithridates to the Crimea, where the latter committed suicide on hearing that his son had rebelled. Pompey, apparently unstoppable, went on and conquered Jerusalem, and marched as far as the Caspian Sea. His achievement was as remarkable, in its way, as that of Alexander the Great.

Meanwhile Pompey’s ally Julius Caesar was making a name for himself in Spain. This Caesar was a remarkable young man, but no one expected him to become a great national leader. As a youth he had been fashionably ‘precious’, writing poetry, perfuming and curling his hair and having love affairs – apparently with men as well as women. He was regarded much as Oscar Wilde was in the 1890s. Mommsen describes him as Rome’s sole creative genius; but, like most Romans, Caesar lacked the imagination to be genuinely creative. He also possessed a good measure of the Roman ruthlessness. As a young man, he had been captured by pirates, who had told him they wanted twenty talents ransom; Caesar said haughtily that they were insulting him and he would give them fifty. Waiting for the ransom to arrive, he lived among them as if they were his servants, telling them to be quiet when he wanted to sleep. He joined in their games and made them sit and listen while he read them his poetry; when they proved less than appreciative, he called them barbarians and told them he would have them crucified when he was freed. They laughed indulgently at the spoilt and imperious young man. As soon as the ransom arrived, Caesar hurried to the nearest port – Miletus in Asia Minor – commandeered several ships and returned to surprise the pirates. He then had them crucified but, as a humane concession, cut their throats before nailing them to the cross.

Back from Spain, Caesar was appointed Aedile, the master of ceremonies in public celebrations. He borrowed large sums from Crassus and staged some spectacular shows, one of them with 320 pairs of gladiators. This made him immensely popular with the people – which is why Crassus wanted his friendship. When Pompey came back from his conquests in 62 B.C., Julius Caesar was becoming a power to be reckoned with, while the senate showed its jealousy of Pompey by snubbing him (after all, he had gone over to the people’s party). Caesar suggested an alliance: he was the most popular man in Rome, Crassus was the richest, Pompey was its greatest hero; together they could do what they liked. The senate could be overruled by the people. Ever since that unfortunate affair of the triumph over Spartacus, Pompey and Crassus had been rivals. Now they both saw the virtue of the alliance. They became known to their friends as the triumvirate, to their enemies as the three-headed monster.

In the following year, 59 B.C., the three-headed monster achieved the first of its aims: Caesar was elected consul, in the teeth of bitter opposition from the patricians. He then used his power to get Pompey what he wanted: land for his soldiers. Pompey and Crassus were appointed head of a commission to administer new laws. The three men were virtually the rulers of Rome.

It could have been the beginning of a new era. All three men were intelligent. None of them had the temperament of a dictator. Together they could have steered the whole country into a new age of prosperity and enlightenment. But somehow Rome was not destined to become another Athens. It had gone too far along the road into power politics. Caesar soon became tired of the endless back-biting and in-fighting, and marched off to Gaul, looking for adventure and glory. He found both over the next five years, as his armies subdued the Gauls from the Rhine to the North Sea, then crossed the Channel and conquered half of Britain. Back in Rome, Pompey and Crassus viewed these triumphs with mixed feelings. Crassus got himself appointed to the command of the army in Syria and went off to try and outdo Caesar. It proved to be a disaster. He was an incompetent, and ended by getting his troops massacred and himself beheaded. When the patricians offered to make Pompey sole consul of Rome, he decided to betray Caesar and change sides.

When Caesar was ordered to leave his army and return to Rome, he realised that things had taken a dangerous turn. To us, it sounds preposterous that the man who had conquered half Europe should have anything to fear. But Caesar knew that his conquests had only aroused envy. Like all trivial people, the Romans hated greatness. So he decided to disobey orders and marched his army to the banks of the river that divided France from Italy – the Rubicon. And when the senate ordered him to disband his army or be considered a public enemy, he gave the order to cross.

Pompey fled to Greece, and Caesar entered Rome in triumph and had himself appointed consul instead. Then he went to Greece and defeated Pompey’s vastly superior forces at the battle of Pharsalus. Pompey sailed for Egypt and, as he stepped ashore, was stabbed in the back by his Egyptian hosts. Egypt was not interested in defeated generals.

Unaware that Pompey was dead, Caesar followed him to Egypt and found himself embroiled in a squabble between the boy king Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra. Caesar took Cleopatra’s part – fathering a son on her, according to Plutarch – and defeated Ptolemy’s army, with some help from the son of Rome’s old enemy Mithridates. Cleopatra was installed on the throne of Egypt and Caesar sailed back to Rome and to a magnificent public triumph – the leading chariot bore the words ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Unlike Marius and Sulla, Caesar pardoned all his former enemies. This proved to be a mistake; they stabbed him to death in the senate on the morning of 15 March 44 B.C.

It seems typical that the Romans should murder the greatest man that they had yet produced – the man who had restored to them something of the greatness of earlier centuries. But then, Rome had become a sewer. Although Caesar had given them back empire and riches, nothing could save them from the consequences of their own triviality and viciousness.

The next part of the story is known to everyone who has read Shakespeare – Mark Antony’s oration, which turned the Roman mob against the assassins, the squabble between Antony and Caesar’s nephew and heir, Octavius, and their subsequent uneasy partnership, Antony’s famous affair with Cleopatra in Egypt and his abandonment of his wife Octavia (who was Octavius’s sister); and, finally, the sad ending of it all with the suicide of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium. But at least Octavius became the master of Rome and, as the emperor Augustus, ruled wisely and well for more than forty years.

The Roman historian Suetonius, the author of a gossipy and often thoroughly scandalous book on the Caesars, tells us that Augustus’s personal life was unexceptionable – after mentioning a dozen or so tales that suggest that Roman standards of respectability must have been unusually low. These include the suggestions that Julius Caesar had adopted Octavius as his heir in exchange for being allowed to sodomise him, that Octavius was fond of committing adultery (on one occasion dragging the lady from table to bedroom in front of her husband and bringing her back with blushing cheeks and disordered hair) and that even as an old man he was fond of deflowering very young girls, who were procured for him by his wife Livia. Yet in theory he believed strongly in the old Roman virtues and did his best to bring them back into favour; when he discovered that his daughter Julia – married to the future emperor Tiberius – was a nymphomaniac who continually seduced her husband’s soldiers, and even slaves, he was so shocked that he had her banished for life.