The First Triumvirate
Faced with a dysfunctional republic collapsing around them, three men joined forces to make politics personal in Rome...
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually, and then suddenly"
This famous exchange from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises does more than just describe the process of financial ruin — it perfectly captures the collapse of the Roman Republic.
Much of popular culture focuses on the ‘suddenly’ of the Republic’s demise. But in fact, the most romanticised era of governance in Ancient Rome, born of a bloody coup d’état and plagued by illegitimacy ever after, is the epitome of ‘gradually’.
When Gaius Julius Caesar was born, on the 12th July 100 BC, the Rubicon had in truth already been crossed. A generation earlier, the murders of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus had established the fatal precedent that the optimates (the oligarchs who controlled the Roman Republic) could arbitrarily employ violence against popular politicians who threatened their interests, without any legal repercussions.
The deadly fallout of these events destroyed the rule of law in Rome, as all sides realised that violence in the streets was more efficient than any veto in the Assemblies. It was only a matter of time before gang warfare escalated into actual warfare.
Finally, in 88 BC, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla — enraged to learn that his command in the middle of a major war had been undermined by a Senate corruptly coerced by his political rival — became the first Roman to march on the Eternal City under arms. When he entered Rome, Julius Caesar was but twelve years old.
The last century of the Roman Republic was an age in which idealists were either ignored or killed. It was an age in which institutions counted for nothing, and personal loyalty counted for everything. In 59 BC, three men understood this — and teamed up to force change in a system hell-bent on ruining any who sought to make a difference.
What follows is the story of how the First Triumvirate took on the Roman establishment, broke the obstructionism of the Senate, and threw open the doors on the failure that was the Roman Republic…
Crassus - The Money
Marcus Licinius Crassus was perhaps the greatest, and the worst, example of a self-made man in Ancient Rome.
Crassus, the eldest of the three triumvirs, was a man who possessed many virtues — from his willingness to give aid to friends, to his readiness to address all men by their name, regardless of their rank. Alas, his virtues were all too often undermined by his chief vice of avarice — and in the Rome of the Late Republic, such a vice found fertile ground to flourish.
As a loyal lieutenant of Sulla, Crassus scarcely escaped with his life when the Consul Lucius Cornelius Cinna threatened death upon those who had supported the general’s march on Rome in 88 BC. Six years later, when Sulla marched upon Rome a second time, the retribution was terrible.
In a Herculean effort to purge the Roman state of its ills, Sulla, now Dictator, rewrote the constitution, strengthened the Senate, and harshly curtailed the rights of the popular assemblies. He did not stop, however, at pure statecraft. Sulla then initiated a deadly proscription, whereby the names of all opponents were displayed in public places, with the announcement that any man could kill them without prosecution.
The bloodbath which ensued claimed the lives of hundreds of men, as the reborn Republic was consecrated by extraordinary evil, and prolonged by the sacrifice of torrents of blood. As the properties of the slain were auctioned off, one man was invariably present to acquire such prime real estate on the cheap.
Crassus, by combining this practice with the extortion of those who feared fire and war, acquired legendary wealth. He then invested his profits in Rome and in the provinces, acquired armies of slaves, and reaped the proceeds of mining. In doing so, he became not only the richest man in Rome, but one of the richest men who has ever lived.
Such wealth would sustain Crassus long after Sulla’s death, allowing him to build a political career, though his opportunism endeared him to few. Nevertheless, it was ultimately Crassus who spared the Republic from repeated military humiliations at the hand of Spartacus, raising legions at his own expense and ultimately crushing the slave revolt at the Silarus River in 71 BC.
It was a decisive victory, though one rushed on account of the sudden arrival of the armies of Pompey from Spain. The fears of Crassus would be realised when Pompey, who had done little more than round up the stragglers from the battle, sought to claim credit for the victory, thus fostering a deep-seated loathing between the two.
It was a rivalry heightened to the gravest of tension when both men were elected consuls the following year, and found that they “differed on almost every measure, and by their contentiousness rendered their consulship barren politically and without achievement” (Plutarch, Crassus, 12.2).
Crassus had it all, except the love of the people. He yearned for the chance to win undivided military glory that would seal his name in immortality, and prove once and for all to Rome that he was more than a mere businessman. This desire would form a major underlying motive for Crassus to enter the triumvirate.
The immediate cause, however, was nevertheless business. For as a result of his own means and reputation, by 60 BC Crassus had become the de facto representative of the equestrian order — the social rung one step below the aristocratic senatorial order, which formed Rome’s effective business class. Indeed, the collection of taxes in the provinces under the Roman Republic was outsourced to equestrian publicani, who by the 1st century BC had a reputation for rapacity, given the total absence of state oversight of provincial governance.
A fatal mistake on their part, however, came when a certain group of publicani enormously overbid on tax collection contracts in Asia, having underestimated the extent of the devastation wrought by the war against Mithridates VI of Pontus, which had dominated the early decades of the century. With the Senate subsequently calling in the taxes, and the publicani unable to pay, the equestrians looked to Crassus to intercede on their behalf, and have the contracts renegotiated.
Yet one faction of the Senate, headed by Cato the Younger, soon blocked all legislative business in the Republic in order to stymie Crassus — for no other reason than to deny a political victory to a man they disliked personally, and throw the equestrians under the bus in the process. At this, Crassus began to look for allies. Fate smiled, for he would soon find one in his erstwhile nemesis.
Pompey - The Muscle
Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, called Pompey for English convenience, was a man who embodied both the corrosion of the Republic and the consequence of it. The middle man by age of the triumvirs, Pompey would, like Crassus, rise to prominence during Sulla’s seizure of Rome.
Unlike Crassus, however, Pompey as a young man owed almost everything to the public adulation he received as a commander, and possessed that rare quality of continuously getting away with deeds that would sink the careers of other men. Bravely, he openly challenged both Sulla and Senate alike, using his army to leverage favours and earning the Dictator’s anger and begrudging respect as he did.
For the two decades that followed Sulla’s death, Pompey would cement his reputation as a commander by warring down the by now sizeable rebellions that had erupted in Spain and Africa, and thereafter by his vast conquests in the East, adding Syria, Judaea and eastern Anatolia to the annexed and subject dominions of Rome.
His final defeat of Mithridates in 63 BC, who for some thirty years had been the most formidable foreign enemy of Rome since Hannibal, sealed his fame as ‘Pompey the Great’.
The spoils of Pompey’s campaigns defy exaggeration. With the conquest of a thousand strongholds from Pontus to Arabia, the revenues of the Roman Republic are alleged to have swelled from fifty to eighty five million drachmae, in addition to a one-off injection of twenty thousand silver talents into the treasury. It was therefore beyond belief that the Senate, spearheaded by Cato once more, poured scorn onto the soldiers who had made this possible, denying Pompey’s proposed settlement to grant them the farms they had been promised as a reward for military service.
With Crassus pressured by his clients, and Pompey by tens of thousands of potentially militant landless veterans, both men were united by circumstance in common cause. It would however, take a third party to smooth relations between both men, and lead them to such a realisation.
Caesar - The Bridge
Pompey’s junior by six years, Gaius Julius Caesar was the youngest of the triumvirs. Differently to the others, however, Caesar had not experienced Sulla’s favour — rather, he had felt his wrath.
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