The last decades of the Roman Republic were dominated by the
ambitions and machinations of three figures: Cn. Pompieus Strabo Magnus
(Pompey), M. Licinius Crassus, and C. Julius Caesar. Any examination of the
period from 70 to 44 BC inevitably hinges on one, two, or all three of these
men at any given time, and therefore their biographies become essential to the
student of the period. In their attempts to reveal and evaluate the lives of
these figures, Robin Seager’s Pompey the Great: A Political Biography, Allen M. Ward’s Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic, and Richard A. Billows’ Julius Caesar: The Colossus of Rome, present the
reader with both the best and worst of the art of historical biography.
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| Cn. Pompeius Strabo Magnus |
Robin
Seager makes no bones about his intent with his Pompey the Great: A Political
Biography, stating in his preface that “the subtitle of the present work is
intended to warn the reader to expect no treatment of the detail of Pompeius’
wars and no estimate of him as a commander,” and indeed, the following sixteen
chapters give only the briefest treatment of Pompey’s military career. Seager
begins with a brief introduction giving an overview of Roman political history
from 133 – 79 BC, and begins his biography proper with the career and death of
Pompey’s father, Cn. Pompeius Strabo senior. He then proceeds chronologically
through Pompey’s life, paralleling political events in Rome with Pompey’s
overseas dispositions, paying particular attention in both cases to Pompey’s
time in the East from 66 – 62 BC. Seager presents a portrait of Pompey as a man
of overweening ambition and political acumen, whose desire for public recognition
from the Senate as the traditional ruling body of the Republic was both in
opposition to his life-long willingness to stretch the unwritten Roman
constitution and traditions, the mos
maiorum, to the breaking point, and yet also functioned as a restraint on
that same ambition. As Seager concludes, “[Pompey’s] eagerness for honors to be
granted him willingly had compelled him to acknowledge the right of the senate
and people to deny him if they chose. He had wanted to be the dominant figure
in the senate, but in a senate that was still the ruler of Rome… Pompeius then
did not want to destroy the republic.” Seager places the blame for that
squarely on Caesar’s shoulders, but does not neglect to point out that Pompey’s
own actions did little or nothing to preserve the system he so desperately
sought command of and approval from.
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| M. Licinius Crassus |
Allen M.
Ward presents the reader with another political biography with his Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic.
Here again, Crassus’ military career is only briefly described, and his final,
fatal campaign against the Parthians almost not at all. Ward too devotes his
first chapter to setting the historical scene, and uses chapter appendices to
this and chapters VIII and IX to provide the reader with detailed prosopographical
data which serves to illuminate his research process and the conclusions
reached in the chapters themselves. These appendices strike a nice balance
between relying on overly long footnotes and the traditional consignment of the
appendices to the back of the book, and serve well in providing the reader with
further information without bogging down the primary narrative, which proceeds
in chronological order from the scarce sources surrounding Crassus’ birth
ca.115 BC to his defeat and death at Carrhae in 53 BC. Ward is particularly painstaking
in his analysis of the known political and legislative events in Rome with an
eye to discovering the probable prime movers behind various proposed laws,
prosecutions, defenses, speeches, and other public performances in Rome during
Crassus’ career. Ward presents Crassus as something of a moderate optimate; an inherently conservative
politician who was nonetheless generally amenable to compromise when possible,
and who “often tended towards the via
media,” the middle road.
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| C. Julius Caesar Dictator |
Richard A.
Billows’ Julius Caesar: the Colossus of
Rome, is part of Routledge’s Roman
Imperial Biographies series, and proves to be a readable and concise
addition to the many biographies of Caesar. Billows begins with a prologue that
also serves as a bibliographic essay with an emphasis on works which challenge
the traditional interpretations, and which Billows, while not necessarily in
agreement with them, credits as valuable lenses for providing fresh
perspectives on his subject. Billows also provides historical background and
context in his first chapter, devoting fully a fifth of his text to the history
of Rome and Italy in the second century BC, before proceeding chronologically
through Caesar’s life, with the exception of chapter VIII: “Caesar’s Place in Roman
Literature and Culture,” a thematic interlude placed between the flight
northward of the tribunes M. Antonius and Q. Cassius in late 50, and the
crossing of the Rubicon in early 49. Billows’ Caesar is a popularis through and through, becoming the central figure in a
movement that Billows sees as springing from, and directly connected with the Marian
and Cinnan movement of the 80s BC. He also fixes Caesar as the lynchpin in what
Ronald Syme has termed the “Roman Revolution,” and his associates and followers
as the power behind it both during Caesar’s life, and beyond.
Taken
together, these three biographies provide an uneven look at the three men who
comprised what historians refer to as the First Triumvirate. Ward is working
from the fewest sources, and thus is necessarily the most reliant on
prosopographic and legislative analysis. Though he is careful to acknowledge
the problems inherent in this approach, his analyses are impressive, and more
often than not, convincing. He also provides a valuable counterpoint to the
traditional portrayal of Crassus as a paragon of ruthless greed, pointing out that
both Pompey and Caesar became far wealthier than Crassus, yet were not
condemned for their wealth due to the way in which they acquired it: by
conquest. Crassus, who made his money through business deals and speculation
which were considered beneath the Roman nobility, “became the subject of a
hostile literary tradition that was set by his political enemies, who scorned
the methods Crassus adopted…” Nonetheless, due to the paucity of source
material, and the fact that Crassus seems to have often preferred to work
behind the scenes rather than openly on the public stage, makes Ward’s efforts,
even at their best, more speculative than not.
Seager confronts
similar problems, and handles them poorly. His political and legislative
analysis often seems to be naïve, as when he states that the assignment of the
forests and cow-paths of Italy as the provinces of the consuls of 59 was not a
move by the optimates in the senate
to curtail Caesar’s growing power and ambition by denying him the prospect of a
foreign war. According to Seager, “at the time when the allocation [of
provinces] was made… Caesar had not yet been elected, and even if the optimates
had already felt certain that he was bound to take one place, they would not
have wanted to rob their own candidate Bibulus of a proper command.” To suggest
that the optimates, no strangers to
the realities of Roman politics, could not foresee that Caesar, who had won
election to every magistracy on the cursus
honorum up to the praetorship in the first year he was eligible, and whose
status, wealth, and political power had only increased during his propraetorian
command in Spain, was almost certain to secure the consulship, is bordering on
the absurd.
Seager’s
greatest fault, and one shared with Ward, is his choice to largely omit any
examination of Pompey’s military career. The distinction between civil and
military power in ancient Rome was nonexistent, and each affected the other
profoundly. In the case of Pompey, his entire political career was predicated
on his military activities, and largely consisted in repeated attempts to
secure special commands, and with them, praise and power in Rome. It is not
going too far to say that without his military achievements and ambitions,
Pompey would have had no political career, or if he had it would have been a
far different, likely much less pivotal one. In a very real way Seager gives
the reader half a man, and half the story.
Ward too
fails to detail Crassus’s military career, though he does slightly better than
Seager with his discussions of Crassus’ service during Sulla’s civil war,
though Crassus’ role in the victory of the Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BC
does not receive nearly the attention which it deserves, nor does his
successful campaign against Spartacus in 72/1. Most unfortunately, however,
Ward chooses not to detail Crassus campaign leading up to Carrhae at all, thus
omitting the vital ending to Crassus’ tale. Again the choice to focus on the
political at the complete expense of the military, particularly when examining
Roman statesmen, proves to be a grave error.
Billows,
does not fall into this trap, and combines astute political analysis—though
not, perhaps, at the level offered by Ward—with a thorough understanding of the
importance of Caesar’s military career to the man and his life as a whole.
Billows does an excellent job of covering Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, and the
Civil War against Pompey while also tying these campaigns into the larger
picture of Caesar as statesman. Indeed, over all, Billows’ work is of high
quality, and made even more impressive for being so complete within the space
of some 263 pages. The one place where he stumbles is in the thematic chapter
VIII, mentioned above. Though it provides valuable information, it is oddly
placed within the narrative, and disrupts the heretofore chronological
structure of the historical narrative to no truly good end. This chapter might
have been of better service as an appendix, or even woven into the primary
narrative as part of Caesar’s life in the 60s BC. Another glaring weak point
lies in Billows claim that the young Octavian was to have served as Caesar’s
Master of the Horse during the Parthian campaign planned for 44/3, a claim for
which Billows presents no source or argument, and which the present reviewer’s
research turned up no evidence. These oddities aside, Billows provides the best
of the three biographies reviewed here, and certainly one of the best resources
for a student of the period, combining his bibliographic prologue with a
standard bibliographic list at the end of the text.
Though each
of the biographies reviewed here has its strengths, neither separately nor
together do they provide a complete picture of the First Triumvirs, or of their
time. At best they provide a starting point for further research, and a general
overview of the period from which to begin such research. There is still much
to learn, and one hopes many more biographies on all three of these men to
come.
