Augustus

The Senate was furious but powerless. Sooner or later, it hoped, the trio would quarrel. Then the time would come when the optimates could take their revenge. The Senate’s leading personality at this time was Marcus Porcius Cato—a dour man. Plutarch reports: “It was really very difficult to make him laugh, although once in a while, he allowed himself to relax his features into a smile.” He refused to use perfume and his personal habits were severe. He always walked, and trained himself to endure extremes of heat and cold. He was a hard worker and prided himself on never telling a lie; his reputation inspired a proverb—“That cannot be true, even if Cato says it is.” His way of life was a reproach to the decadence of the times, so much so that he could infuriate his friends as well as his enemies.

Whereas Caesar appears to have been an abstemious drinker, Cato was puritanical in everything except for an enormous capacity for alcohol and a surprising weakness for gambling. He remarked that “Caesar was the only sober man who tried to wreck the constitution.”

After his consulship, Caesar went to rule Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul (northern Italy and southern France). Wanting to prove himself as a general, he invaded the rest of Gaul (central and northern France and Belgium). When he needed more time to complete the conquest, he arranged a second five-year term as governor. By 49 B.C., he had added a huge new province to the empire—and in so doing created an experienced army that would follow wherever he led.

In 53 B.C., Crassus commanded an expedition against the Parthian empire. The Parthians were fierce former nomads who became the dominating force on the Iranian plateau during the third century B.C. From about 190 B.C., they intermittently governed Mesopotamia, the heartland of the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires. They were highly skilled horsemen, famous for the “Parthian shot”: they rode up to the enemy, then suddenly galloped away, turning round in their seat to loose an arrow. The Romans, who depended on infantry, found these highly mobile fighters hard to defeat.

This was problematic, for the Parthian monarchs were aggressive, with a tendency to meddle in Rome’s eastern provinces and in the client kingdoms that acted as a buffer between the two empires and that Rome saw as within its sphere of influence. Both sides aimed to control the strategically important, semi-independent kingdom of Armenia (it looked both eastward and westward, being attached to the plateau of Asia Minor and the Iranian plateau, and it had long been a bone of contention). Luckily, murderous dynastic disputes often distracted the Parthians from foreign adventures.

Rome was itself frequently guilty of interference. A few years previously, the proconsul of Syria had supported a claimant to the Parthian crown, a move which, although unsuccessful, naturally infuriated the sitting monarch.

As a result, relations between the two powers were icy, and each side felt it had good reason to launch a preventive war against the other. Hostilities were hastened by Crassus’ personal ambitions, for he was intent on winning military glory that would rival the achievements of Pompey and Caesar.

Crassus marched an army of about thirty-five thousand men into Mesopotamia. Near a place called Carrhae he came up against a force of about ten thousand mounted archers. The terrain was open downland, ideal for cavalry maneuvers, and the Parthians steadily shot down the helpless legionaries. The Romans sought terms and Crassus was killed during the negotiations. Only ten thousand of his men survived the debacle. Humiliatingly, many legionary standards were captured.

This was a massive blow to Rome’s pride that would demand revenge as soon as the political situation at home permitted it.

Gaius was too young to understand these events when they took place. But he lived in a family that had been engaged in high politics for at least two generations, and the issues of the day must have been regularly discussed at home. Close relatives found themselves on different sides of the fence, and at least one of them, Gaius’ stepfather, Philippus, preferred to sit on it. His full sister Octavia, not his half sister of the same name by their father’s first marriage, was wedded at the age of fifteen or sixteen to Gaius Claudius Marcellus, a middle-aged optimate twenty years or so her senior, who strongly disapproved of Caesar’s constitutional recklessness.

In 56 B.C., when the boy was seven, Philippus became consul. Gaius did not need to master the complexities of his great-uncle’s alliance with Pompey and Crassus to enjoy the glamour and excitement of the consulship. It was the peak of achievement for a Roman and, although the boy mostly lived in the country, we may imagine that he was brought to Rome to witness Philippus in all the splendor of his office.