A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

anks of the river that divided France from Italy - the Rubicon. And when the senate ordered him to
disband his army or be considered a public enemy, he gave the order to cross.
Pompey fled to Greece, and Caesar entered Rome in triumph and had himself appointed consul
instead. Then he went to Greece and defeated Pompey’s vastly superior forces at the battle of
Pharsalus. Pompey sailed for Egypt and, as he stepped ashore, was stabbed in the back by his
Egyptian hosts. Egypt was not interested in defeated generals.
Unaware that Pompey was dead, Caesar followed him to Egypt and found himself embroiled in a
squabble between the boy king Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra. Caesar took Cleopatra’s part -
fathering a son on her, according to Plutarch - and defeated Ptolemy’s army, with some help from
the son of Rome’s old enemy Mithridates. Cleopatra was installed on the throne of Egypt and
Caesar sailed back to Rome and to a magnificent public triumph - the leading chariot bore the
words ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Unlike Marius and Sulla, Caesar pardoned all his former
enemies. This proved to be a mistake; they stabbed him to death in the senate on the morning of 15
March 44 B.C.
It seems typical that the Romans should murder the greatest man that they had yet produced - the
man who had restored to them something of the greatness of earlier centuries. But then, Rome had
become a sewer. Although Caesar had given them back empire and riches, nothing could save them
from the consequences of their own triviality and viciousness.
The next part of the story is known to everyone who has read Shakespeare - Mark Antony’s
oration, which turned the Roman mob against the assassins, the squabble between Antony and
Caesar’s nephew and heir, Octavius, and their subsequent uneasy partnership, Antony’s famous
affair with Cleopatra in Egypt and his abandonment of his wife Octavia (who was Octavius’s
sister); and, finally, the sad ending of it all with the suicide of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle
of Actium. But at least Octavius became the master of Rome and, as the emperor Augustus, ruled
wisely and well for more than forty years.
The Roman historian Suetonius, the author of a gossipy and often thoroughly scandalous book on
the Caesars, tells us that Augustus’s personal life was unexceptionable - after mentioning a dozen
or so tales that suggest that Roman standards of respectability must have been unusually low. These
include the suggestions that Julius Caesar had adopted Octavius as his heir in exchange for being
allowed to sodomise him, that Octavius was fond of committing adultery (on one occasion
dragging the lady from table to bedroom in front of her husband and bringing her back with
blushing cheeks and disordered hair) and that even as an old man he was fond of deflowering very
young girls, who were procured for him by his wife Livia. Yet in theory he believed strongly in the
old Roman virtues and did his best to bring them back into favour; when he discovered that his
daughter Julia - married to the future emperor Tiberius - was a nymphomaniac who continually
seduced her husband’s soldiers, and even slaves, he was so shocked that he had her banished for
life.
If Augustus himself- not to mention his daughter - could set such a bad example, what could he
expect of the rest of Rome? Augustus could use the empire’s wealth to rebuild Rome in marble, to
clear the roads of robbers, to set up the city’s first police force and a fire-fighting service that would
extinguish blazes without preliminary bargaining; he could banish Ovid, who wrote The Art of
Love, and shower favours on Virgil, who wrote about the fields and wanted to see a return of the
old ways; but the mob wanted their entertainments and free hand-outs, and Augustus had to keep
them happy with an increasing number of public holidays and spectacular shows until in the end