#elephant boy

[Hi, this is me stanning Adrian Goldsworthy’s biography of Caesar. I studied Classics, but not this period, so all I can contribute here are squeals of delight, a few mistakes and the occasional witty comment. If you’d like to know more, please buy the book - it’s really good and a fun read.]

PART 1

So the first thing that’s important to remember if we’re talking about Rome is that Rome sucked. And, I mean, it sucked in a wide variety of very specific ways, but when it comes to the world Caesar would soon be born into, well - Rome sucked because it fooled everyone into thinking it was a democracy (to. this. fucking. day.) when it really, really wasn’t.

Basically, Rome worked the usual way: if you’re rich, you get a say; if you’re not, fucking starve maybe? Loser.

Specifically, the main reason why Rome had managed to defeat everyone else by that point is because it was a very well-structured, yet oddly flexible, oligarchy - which means you don’t have a mad king suddenly deciding he’s going to invade the Moon (= monarchy) or some rich asshole forming a new party and causing a civil war (= democracy). Instead, wealthy people worked together to remain wealthy, and those who seemed a bit dangerous or too ambitious could be booted out before they became a problem.

More specifically, there were three bodies of power (we’re talking about 130 BC or so): the magistrates, the Senate and the Popular Assemblies.

The magistrates are few, and they normally only stay in power for one year, but they can do a lot of things. A lot. They’re sort of the executive, and if you’re rich and talented, that’s where you start your career.

The Senate is a ~parliament: it convenes when the magistrates decide it should, debates stuff and votes on stuff. You’re automatically part of it if you’re a) rich enough and b) old enough and c) obviously a man and also d) a Roman (duh).

The Assemblies are fun. They can’t debate or propose anything, just vote on items from a list, and traditionally vote what the Senate tells them they should vote. Also the nice part is - in theory, these were open to all male citizens BUT not everyone’s vote was equal. There were, like, groups depending on class and wealth, and every group had one vote. Surprisingly, this tended to favour richer people, simply because there’s always more poor people than rich people. So a group of three very rich people would share one vote, and a group of two billion poor people would also share one vote. 

Another fun fact is that shortly before Caesar was born the system was starting to crack because imperialism. 

You’d think imperialism would be a good thing! But nope!! History is full of surprises!!! See, the problem is as follows:

You have a beautiful new country but it’s tiny and all your neighbours have Things and could be Dangerous, so you start attacking them and later write 9896-line poems on how you had to attack them because alas, your tribe had no women and women are the absolute best.

To prevent the survivors from stabbing you in the back, you offer them generous peace terms, like low taxes, paved roads and not-quite-a-Roman-but-hey-at-least-you’re-not-a-barbarian-anymore status.

Great. Now you have a larger territory and a free supply of soldiers (which your allies have to provide, cf. *Terms &Conditions) to go to war.

Unfortunately, these new wars take more time because in order to kill people and destroy entire civilisations you’re forced to go farther and farther away from home. #LiveLoveTravel

What this means is that the poorer soldiers in your army are struggling to keep their day job - if they’re away from home for five years, their farms won’t produce anything much.

Luckily, you and your friends are getting richer and richer because of everything you stole in the conquered lands and also all the slaves you’re bringing back.

[*instert light bulb gif*]

That’s how rich people start buying poor people off their land and creating vast estates farmed by slaves.

Meanwhile, those who can’t afford to play Roman monopoly basically become professional soldiers, which means more than half or the economy suddenly depends on being in a permanent state of war.

Spoiler alert: this fine and just system stops working when a) you run out of countries to crush or b) your military commanders are rich idiots who keep losing battles or c) enough soldiers get old and need an actual job, money and a house. 

And this brings us to about 30 BC (before Caesar), ie 130 BC (before Christ, but at this point, of course, it’s all a bit Christ who?).

By now, all of those three things have started to happen. 

In particular, a large bit of the Roman army is massacred by some Northern tribes who, honestly, were just moving around and Didn’t see you there, my bad, and the entire city of Rome starts to freak the fuck out. As it usually happens, this means the one decent startegist they’ve got in the entire army gets promoted - Marius, Caesar’s uncle and a hero of many foreign wars, becomes consul and basically stays consul well after the official terms. 

(Which: weird and dangerous! A threat to ‘democracy’!

But: he slaughters a lot of dangerous enemies abroad, so that’s fine.)

And secondly: someone realizes inequality is a ticking time bomb and they’d better find a place and a good salary for all those soldiers before they form a mob and burn everything to the ground.

Enter the Gracchi brothers. 

I know everyone goes through a teenage phase of stanning the Gracchi (including the whole ‘I’ll pretend-kiss that poster of yours I’ve got in my bedroom’), but just as a reminder, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were two tribunes who tried to make the Roman system work for everyone, not just the 1%, and were brutally murdered for their trouble.

(Of course, this being Rome it’s completely possible they were self-serving assholes drafting legislation to win over the public and crown themselves Mr et Mr Universum, but let’s be optimistic for fucking once.

I like them.

There.)

Their proposals were stuff like: limiting how much land one guy can own, redistribution of all that other land to the poor (which automatically created more soldiers for the army, btw, because you couldn’t fight if you didn’t own land), fighting against senatorial corruption, giving more rights to allied tribes and keeping wheat at a set price so nobody would actually starve to death when the markets were bad.

As I said, they were both lynched by political opponents, which doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that Rome was surprised. Apparently, despite - well - everything - until 133 BC, when Tiberius and his friends were chased down the streets by angry senators, killed with random furniture and then thrown in the Tiber, Roman politics had been sort of civilised.

(Uh.)

With that murder, it all changed, and this is how Caesar’s story begins. 

[Hi, this is me stanning Adrian Goldsworthy’s biography of Caesar. I studied Classics, but not this period, so all I can contribute here are squeals of delight, a few mistakes and the occasional witty comment. If you’d like to know more, please buy the book - it’s really good and a fun read.]

PART 2

The thing is - there’s a lot of boring relevant political stuff going on in this chapter, but I’m mostly fascinated by the glimpses we get into the world of Roman women. 

As I said, this is not really my area, so I know random, unconnected facts about how life was like for them; also it doesn’t make much sense to talk about ‘Roman women’, because, as a reminder, ‘Rome’ stretches from the 14th century BC to the 14th century AD, came to include dozens of very different regions, and obviously was home to an incredibly diverse population. And if we’re talking about the late Republican / imperial aristocracy, there’s a sharp divide anyway: on the one hand, the ‘ideal woman’ is the same old model we’re all used to and heard about (silent, obedient, virtuous, chaste, a perfect mother and so on), but on the other, Roman noblewomen had a lot more freedom than, say, their Greek counterparts, so there was usually some political scheming going on - something that in Greece was reserved to a handful of very well-placed courtesans. 

(In this sense, think about the contrast between Lucretia, the mythological wife of Collatinus, whose fridging created the Republic, and Agrippina, mother of Nero, empress and all-round badass bitch.)

Anyway, this chapter made me think about women because it starts with Caesar being born and getting his name - it’s sort of an urban legend, btw, that every single Roman had three names: that was just for the Moste Noblest - and how Goldsworthy casually mentions that, unlike men, women of noble birth would just take their family surname as first name. In Caesar’s family, for instance, all the women were named Julia.

(As a reminder: his given name was Caius, then ‘Julius’ identified the tribe, and finally ‘Caesar’ was a nickname that was possibly given to his grandfather for something elephant-related. 

People whose grandfathers did not do elephant-related stuff generally never enjoyed the prestige of a funny nickname passed down through the generations.)

So it’s bad enough that twins might be named ‘Peter and Not-Peter’ or ‘Peter and Twin’, but imagine going to the park with your buggy and meeting your old friend Oldest She-Jones (daughter of Ferdinand Jones), now married to George David Taylor, and her five kids - Louis David Taylor, She-Taylor, She-Taylor the Second, She-Taylor the Third and She-Taylor Born on Christmas. So damn cute, and also the reason why the Romans never developed smartphones or social media - how the hell are you supposed to find someone on Vultocodex when every single cousin and aunt has the exact same name?

Poor management, that is.

But anyway - as I said, there’s a dissonance here because women being treated like garbage (like, not given normal names and married off at fourteen) also led to the very peculiar phenomenon: generations of (male) politicians and VIPs being raised by very forceful, strong, and ambitious (widowed) mothers. Because if you count old age, wars, trampolining injuries (let’s be honest, men have always been obsessed with attempting dangerous stunts just for the fun of it) and the general risks of Roman politics, it was very usual for a noble kid to not even remember his father at all.

(Nero is a good example of how weird and all-consuming this boy-mother relationship could become - there’s entire books about it, but I’d point 16-and-over readers to Suetonius’ Life of Nero for details.

Keep in mind 95% of it is propaganda because Suetonius hated Nero, but still. HBO-worthy stuff in there.)

All this to say - we know that Caesar had a very close relationship with his mom (named ‘Aurelia’ because - you guessed it - she came from the Aurelii family), who was a near perfect figure of virtue, intelligence, beauty and common sense. Very powerful in her own right, Aurelia raised Caesar basically on her own, because her (much older) husband was either away at war or dead for most of their marriage.

Aside from drinking in Aurelia’s wisdom, Caesar’s education also included the normal lessons noble Roman boys were required to learn: self-worth, narcissism, delusional manias, rhetoric, martial arts, horse-riding, and writing really bad fanfiction based on Greek myths.

And now for the MEANWHILE part.

(I have no idea why this gif was tagged ‘meanwhile’, but I’m not enough of an idiot to let it go to waste, so.)

Meanwhile, all sort of messes were going on.

As I’m sure you remember, at some point the consul was Marius - Caesar’s uncle and a military genius, but not much of a politician. His negotiation tactic of choice was secretly inviting groups of unconnected people to his house on the same night, serving them dinner in two separate rooms so they wouldn’t see one another and try to work out some kind of agreement between them. Whenever a new point came up, Marius would say he had diarrhoea, pretend to run to the bathroom and instead sit down with the second group and see what they thought about the first group’s proposal.

(Isn’t ancient Rome magnificent?)

A big problem Marius had to deal with was how to grant citizenship to the allied tribes in Italy without pissing off current citizens. Basically no one wanted these other guys to be given new rights, but since they supplied more than half the soldiers of the Roman army and got nothing in return, their patience was running a bit thin. At some point, Roman bureaucrats started to erase foreign-born citizens from their lists claiming they were not actual citizens (something so openly dishonest NO OTHER GOVERNMENT would EVER attempt it again), and next yet another tribune working on a citizenship reform was stabbed to death in the street. 

So the allies went to war. 

(This war, confusingly, is known as the Social War, because ‘socius’ means ‘ally’ in Latin.)

As you can imagine, it was a disaster. Most of the allied communities had been part of the Roman republic for I don’t want to check but let’s say decades, they lived side by side with Roman families and fought in the same wars, so it was more of a civil war than anything else. Some tribes chose to remain faithful to Rome, others didn’t. Lots of people died.

Caesar was too young to be a soldier, but this was Cicero’s first taste of war (bet you never thought of that weaselly weasel as a soldier, uh? appearances can be deceiving, folks!). Marius was also involved, but since he was old as shit and had famously weak and leaky guts (hahahhaha), he mostly stayed out of active combat, which wasn’t all that normal for a Roman general. In the end, the whole of Italy, down to defeated tribes, cows, dogs and random patches of mossy rocks, was granted citizenship and everyone went home. Their votes, however, were inserted in the system in such a way that they didn’t count much. 

On the whole, the one winner of this war was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, one of the military commanders, who became a consul soon after.

Another war, because this is Rome and Romans were dicks, but! this one was in the East, which means every single soldier would get super rich and also! wars in the East were considered easy because *insert racist trope here* and! Sulla had been promised that, as the big winner of the Social War, he could go there with his legions and basically enjoy this Disneyland of golden cups and ultraviolence but! at the last moment, Marius, who never liked Sulla much, managed to snatch the commandership from him, which! was completely legal but also *insert outraged emoji* and wait for it! instead of going gentle into the good night, Sulla made a fiery speech to his soldiers all like GUESS WHAT FOLKS WE’RE STUCK HERE SCRATCHING OUR TESTICULI AND THOSE IDIOTS FROM THE 25TH ARE TAKING YOUR GOLD AND YOUR UNWILLING WOMEN and! Sulla’s entire army marched! on! the! city! of! Rome!

It was the first time a Roman army had ever invaded Rome. Nobody was expecting it, and people panicked. Sulla’s men won easily, burned down some buildings, killed some people, generally had a great time; and then Sulla announced a bounty for anyone who’d disembowel his political enemies (including Marius) because he didn’t have time to go to Braavos and learn how to do it himself (remember, he still had his war waiting for him in the East).

(This turned out to be a success, btw. One guy was even killed by his slave - Sulla gave him the promised reward, then shoved him off a mountain because duh, slave and “When I said ‘anyone’, I meant people, not IKEA furniture” and “Honestly”.)

As nobody could have imagined and/or predicted, as soon as Sulla left for Greece Weak Guts Marius came back with an army and took back the city, beheading his way to the Senate and leaving a trail of blood wherever he passed. As soon as he got there, however, he dropped dead - heart attack, trampolining, diarrhoea, who can tell - and the city was taken over by his second-in-command, Lucius Cornelius Cinna.

(Man, what a ride.)

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know what Caesar was doing during this time.

Personally, I like to imagine him in Rome - a well-dressed, grey-eyed 15-year-old, freshly orphaned, horrified and exhilarated by the violence exploding all around him - I see him running down the streets, stopping to watch the corpses float in the dark waters of the Tiber, daring his friends to go and touch the severed heads nailed to the doors of the Senate; recognizing many of those heads as friends and colleagues of his father and uncle (passing a hesitant finger on the cold flesh, remembering how they’d once laughed and frowned and spoken about boring matters from the dais). 

The truth is, Caesar was just a kid. He was supposed to learn about the Republic, and his own role in making it great, by watching his elders. 

God knows what he actually learned, and what he thought, as he was passing through Rome’s paved streets, now shimmering with blood. 

Elephant Boy