Anthony Everitt - The Rise of Rome

Rome’s frequent festivities certainly mitigated the pain of life, but to the slave and the jobless citizen or part-timer the city was a cramped, crowded, smelly, unhealthy habitat. The rich and powerful enjoyed a high level of comfort and ease, but wisely kept a weather eye on the discontents that surrounded them in every street, alley, or crossroads.

IF THERE WAS one man Cato could not stand, who was the epitome of the decadent Greekness of which he so passionately disapproved, it was the hero of Zama, the all-conquering Scipio Africanus. Cato devoted much of his time attempting to discredit him.

There was an annoying grandeur about Scipio. He came from an extremely distinguished patrician family with many consulships to its credit. As we have seen, his father and uncle had been distinguished generals. Since being given command of an army himself at the early age of twenty-five, he had never lost a battle or seen a Roman force defeated. When abroad on foreign commissions, he tended to give himself the airs and graces of a Hellenistic monarch. He did not have the patience or the moral flexibility to thrive in the noisy rivalry of the marketplace; the first-rate general was a third-rate politician.

Worst of all, from Cato’s point of view, Scipio was an unrepentant lover of Hellenic culture. He enjoyed wearing Greek fashions (and when he did put on a toga he draped it in an unusual and, unfriendly commentators said, effeminate manner). He wrote a memoir in Greek and spoke the language fluently. He gave his two sons a Greek education, and probably his two daughters, too, for one of them, Cornelia, the wife of that stickler for religious rules, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, had a reputation in adult life as a highly cultivated woman and an intellectual.

IN 204, THE two men’s paths crossed for the first time. Scipio was in Sicily, assembling his consular army for the invasion of Africa. Cato was one of his quaestors, a junior elected official with financial duties. He argued that his commander was indulging in typically lavish personal expenditure and overpaying his troops. (Many of them were volunteers, so, if there was truth in the claim, the high command was very probably conceding to market forces.) They received much more money than was needed for the necessaries of life, it was said, and were spending the surplus on luxuries and the pleasures of the senses. In other words, Scipio was corrupting the “natural simplicity of his men”; the phrase is Plutarch’s, but it rings true of Cato’s self-serving self-righteousness.

Scipio replied tartly that he had no use for a cheese-paring quaestor, and Cato returned home to stir things up at Rome. He helped Fabius to attack the consul’s waste of immense sums of money. They deplored Scipio’s “boyish addiction to Greek gymnasia and theatrical performances. It was as if he had been appointed the director of an arts festival, not a commander on active service.” A board of inquiry was sent to Sicily, but found nothing to substantiate the charges. The army was in excellent shape, as Scipio showed when he quickly went on to destroy the power of Carthage. He had won this round against his critics, but they would return. The squabbles and maneuvers of domestic politics bored and irritated him. His enemies were always lying in wait for any slip they could exploit.

And, reluctant though some might be to admit it, the suspicion in which Cato and his friends held Scipio was by no means irrational. So great now and so far-flung were the challenges and opportunities facing the triumphant Republic that a general could spend years away from Rome and the picky oversight of the Senate. (Scipio fought in Spain and Africa for almost all of a decade starting in 211.) He commanded soldiers who expected to spend many seasons far from home; in the past, they had been farmers who would leave their fields for only a few months, but now their link with the soil was becoming more and more tenuous. When Scipio demobilized his forces, he was obliged to ask the Senate to give them smallholdings from the ager publicus (state-owned land) so that they had somewhere to live and some means of making a living. If their general did not look after his landless legionaries, who would?

Scipio posed a potential danger to the state, given that he was the master of a great army whose first loyalty was to him. Had he so wished, he could have overshadowed the Senate and even established a formal or an informal despotism. In fact, he did not so wish. He remained at heart loyal to the constitution, that haphazard cocktail of oligarchy moderated by democracy and peopled by an annual procession of temporary monarchs. But it must have occurred to observant senators that a less scrupulous man could accumulate sufficient power with which to subvert the Republic.

It was also true that Rome’s transformation from a middling Italian city-state into an invincible superpower had a coarsening impact on standards in public life. Vast quantities of wealth began to flow not only into the treasury but also into the pockets of the senatorial élite. Bribery during elections began to be widespread, and elected officials recouped the expenditure by extorting money from the provinces—to begin with, the two Spains (Near and Further), Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily—which they went on to govern after their year of office as consul or praetor was over.

As censor in 184, Cato did his best to discourage high living and set punitive taxes on expensive clothing, carriages, women’s ornaments, furniture and plate. Many young men paid fortunes for a rent boy or for highly fashionable pickled fish. In a public speech, Cato said, “Anybody can see that the Republic is going downhill when a pretty lad can cost more than a plot of land and jars of fish more than plowmen.” In no way did Scipio and his family have anything to do with that kind of behavior, but to judge by Polybius’s account of his wife’s appearances in public at religious services there was little attempt to cut costs:

[It was] her habit to appear in great state.… Apart from the magnificence of her personal attire and of the decorations of her carriage, all the baskets, cups and sacrificial vessels or utensils were made of gold or of silver, and were carried in her train on such ceremonial occasions, while the retinue of her maids and manservants who accompanied her was proportionally large.

Scipio’s critics regarded the extravagant splendor of his lifestyle as part of the same general picture of moral decline.

Cato was disgusted by the abuses of power he came across as censor and ruthlessly weeded out the unworthy when he scrutinized the membership lists of the Senate and the class of equites . One particular case that Cato exposed concerned a former consul, Lucius Quinctius Flamininus, and horrified public opinion. Flamininus was conducting an affair with an expensive and notorious male prostitute named Philippus the Carthaginian. He persuaded Philippus to join him on campaign in Cisalpine Gaul (today’s Po Valley). The boy used to tease his lover for having made him leave Rome just before the gladiatorial games, which, as a result, he had had to miss. One evening they were having a dinner party and were flushed with wine when a senior Celtic deserter arrived in the camp. He asked to see the consul, with a view to winning his personal protection.

The man was brought into the tent and began to address Flamininus through an interpreter. While he was speaking, the consul turned to his lover and said, “Since you missed the gladiatorial show, would you like to see this Celt dying?”

The boy nodded, not taking the offer seriously. Flamininus then drew his sword, which was hanging above his couch, struck the Celt’s head while he was still speaking, and ran him through as he tried to escape. This breach of good faith toward someone seeking Rome’s friendship was shocking enough, but what was really dreadful to the Roman mind was the casual ending of a life at a convivium , a boozy party.