Original subtitles

From Bertolt Brecht's novel fragment, The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar

History Lessons

Mummlius Spicer. Banker.

At that time he wasn't doing anything anymore, far as I know.

He'd tried to find a profession and make money.

He'd tried being a lawyer in two suits

for the Democratic Clubs against high Senate officials,

for extortion and abuses in the provinces.

The City paid young lawyers from good families well for such suits.

It was the old fight between the City and the Senate.

Since the dawn of time 300 families shared all high offices in and outside Rome.

The Senate was their Exchange.

There they bargained who'd sit on the Senate bench,

who the judge's chair, who on the battle horse,

and who just on his estate.

They were great landowners who treated other Roman citizens like

servants, and servants like serfs.

Merchants they treated like thieves,

inhabitants of conquered provinces like enemies.

One of them was the old Cato, great grandfather of our Cato,

who in my and C's time led the Senate part.

He praised 2nd-century legislation, whereby the thief had to pay back twice

and the money-lender four times.

A generation before mine they made a law that no Senator could do business.

The law came too late, it was got round at once.

One can do anything with laws - except stop trade.

The law even led to extended trading companies

in which each of 50 partners owns a 50th of a ship,

so that he controls 50 ships instead of just one,

but you can see where these gentlemen were headed.

They were distinguished generals, quite able to conquer provinces,

but they didn't know what to do with them afterwards.

But as our commerce grew out of infancy

and we began to export oil, wool and wine in greater quantity,

and to import grain and other things,

and especially as we wanted to export money and put it to work in provinces,

these gentlemen showed their highborn inability to move with the times,

and the young City realised we lacked rational leadership.

Understand, we felt no desire at all to get on a battle horse,

or to squander our time, which was money,

on unpleasant seats of office.

The gentlemen could peacefully stay where they were -

but only under a solid leadership of the City.

Take the Punic War for example.

We'd conducted it for the best reasons there are:

namely, to beat down African competition.

But what came of it?

Our military men took away from Carthage not her products and taxes,

but her walls and warships.

They didn't fetch the corn, they fetched the plough.

Our generals said proudly, "Where my legions set foot, grass grows no more."

But what we'd wanted was exactly that grass.

You know, from one of those grasses bread is made.

What was conquered in the Punic War, at immense cost, was wastelands.

These territories could well have fed our entire peninsula.

But for the Triumph in Rome, our generals took away from them

everything they needed to work for us - their field tools, their field slaves.

And after such a conquest came a similar administration.

The governors only write the figures in their own household books.

You know no clothing has more pockets than a general's coat.

But the governors' clothes were nothing but pockets.

The gentlemen, when they set foot again on home soil,

jangled with metal no less than if they'd come in armor.

Cornelius Dolabella and Publius Antonius, the figures young C sued,

had loaded half Macedonia on to their ships.

In such a way, naturally one couldn't set up any real commerce.

After every war there were failures and suspension of payments in Rome.

Each victory for the troop was a defeat for the City.

The triumphs of the generals were triumphs over the people.

The cry of woe that arose after Zama, the battle that ended the Punic war,

was bilngual.

It was the cry of woe of the Punic and of the Roman banks.

The Senate slaughtered the milk cow.

The system was rotten through and through.

All this was the talk of the town in Rome.

They chattered in every barber's booth about the moral rot of the Senate.

They even chattered in the Senate itself about

"the necessity for a thorough moral regeneration."

Cato, the Younger, saw a black future for the 300 families.

He resolved to do something for their good name,

and in the cities he governed in Sardinia,

he went out on foot with just one servant

who carried the coat and paten behind him.

And when he returned from his Spanish governorship,

he sold his battle horse beforehand,

because he didn't feel justified charging its transport costs to the state.

Unfortunately his ship struck a storm.

He was shipwrecked and lost his account books,

and for the rest of his life lamented that he couldn't prove to anyone

how decently he'd conducted his affairs.

He knew his attitude was unbelievable.

The City held for nothing "setting a good example" and moral speeches.

It saw clearly what was lacking: officials must be paid.

For the gentlemen performed their office for honor's sake;

to take money for it seemed insulting to them.

With such high ideals there was naturally nothing left to them

but to steal. And they stole

from corn tributes, road building, water from state aqueducts.

The City, as I was said, was not unreasonable.

It contacted merchants in conquered provinces

and encouraged them to institute lawsuits.

Thus there were lawsuits.

Cicero himself, the City's great trumpet, conducted a few for Sicilian firms.

But with time our Senate gentlemen got use to lawsuits,

as one gets used to rain: one puts a coat on.

From then on they no longer stole a lot from a few,

but a little from many.

And when suits threatened, they stole everything.

To conduct lawsuits, money is needed.

So from those they plundered, they also stole the costs of possible suits.

Then rich Democratic Clubs in Rome started financing suits

against the Senatorial robbers, against the most shameless of them

- those who hindered the business of even Roman merchants in the provinces.

These suits did bring a little discredit, and, perhaps more importantly,

young lawyers could work themselves in on the subject.

For here it wasn't enough to make some witty speeches:

the lawyer had to get and coach witnesses,

and to distribute money skillfully, so that judicial mechanism was well oiled.

We even got young lawyers from Senatorial families.

In no other way could they study the administrative machinery better.

One has to have bribed once to be able to let oneself be bribed properly.

C lost both lawsuits.

Some think because he was inefficient.

I think because he was too efficient.

The latter is suggested by his having to leave afterwards,

in order, he himself told me, to get out of the way of

the hostile atmosphere stirred up against him.

He went to Rhodes, supposedly to perfect himself in the art of speaking.

Since this motivation for hasty departure

doesn't sound exactly glorious for a young lawyer,

one presumes there were other motives for going that'd have sounded less glorious.

True, a lawyer sometimes can earn more losing a suit than winning it.

But one shouldn't do this already with the very first suit one obtains.

It was a weakness in this young man that he did nothing by halves.

Presumably he wanted right from the start to be a real lawyer.

He did just the same thing later with military leadership.

I got white hair through it.

But he was considered rather early on as a coming man in the Democratic Party?

Yes, he was considered a coming man.

He came for money.

They were keen on names.

His family was one of the 15 or 16 oldest Patrician families of the city.

You can't deny it speaks for a Democratic disposition

that he totally rejected Sulla's demand that he divorce his first wife,

Cornelia, because she was Cinna's daughter.

Do you mean he wasn't serious about that either?

Why shouldn't he have been serious? Cinna had made a pretty fortune in Spain.

That was confiscated.

Not from C.

When that threatened, he went with it and with Cornelia to Asia.

So you think his refusal to part with Cornelia

had nothing to do with political convictions.

And no doubt love had nothing to do with it either?

No doubt he couldn't love at all, in your view?

Why should I think that?

It was just then that he was in love.

A Syrian freedman. I forget his name.

Cornelia, if people are to be believed, was rather irritated about it.

Already on the ship it came to unpleasant scenes,

and the Syrian insisted that C divorce.

Like Sulla.

But C didn't give way to him either.

He didn't, even if it disappoints you, let his heart rule his head.

And the burial he prepared for her and his aunt?

That was political.

In the funeral procession, he had wax masks of Marius and Cinna carried.

He got 200,000 sestertii from the Democratic Party for it

His family, above all his mother,

whom I've told you about - a very sensible woman -

blamed him for it for a long time.

200,000 sestertii, that was no more than one paid for two good cooks.

But the Clubs thought the payment sufficient,

because there was no longer any danger attached to such demonstration:

the Praetor by then was already a Democrat.

He always needed money.

He even tried the slave trade once.

You've no doubt heard the story about the pirates?

Would you mind repeating what you know of it?

Young Caesar was captured by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa.

They maintained considerable fleets and covered the sea with many vessels.

At first he scoffed at the pirates because they asked for only 20 talents ransom.

Didn't they know whom they'd caught?

He spontaneously offered to pay them 50.

And at once he sent companions to various towns to raise the money.

With his physician, his cook and two manservants, he remained behind

with the murder-hungry Asians.

He continued to treat them so contemptuously

that whenever he lay down to sleep, he ordered them to keep quiet.

38 days he spent in such a way

that the pirates seemed to be his bodyguard, rather than he their captive.

Without the least fear he joked and played with them.

Now and then he even composed poems and speeches

and read them to them.

Those who didn't admire them he called blockheads and barbarians,

and often laughingly threatened he would have them hanged.

The pirates had fun with him and took his speeches as charming jokes.

But as soon as the ransom came from Miletus and he was set free,

he manned vessels in Miletus with armed men

and put to sea against the pirates.

He found them still at anchor off the island and overpowered them.

Their riches he regarded as legitimate booty,

but them themselves he handed over to the prison of Pergamos

and then went to Junius, Governor of Asia, to procure from him punishment

of his prisoners.

But as Junius thought only about what had been taken from the pirates,

which certainly came to an imposing sum,

and so answered indecisively that at the moment

he'd no time to worry about the prisoners.

Caesar, without further word to him, went back to Pergamos

and on his own authority had all the pirates nailed to the cross,

as he'd so often jestingly predicted to them on the island.

Almost everything in his life already looks like that.

I'll tell you what it was. It was the slave trade.

The little affair falls in the period when C used the burial of his first wife and aunt

as a demonstration for Democracy,

immediately after which he'd started suits against the Senators' infractions

in the provinces.

It had to do with his trip to Rhodes,

where he wanted to learn speechmaking from a Greek.

Our young lawyer liked to do several things at the same time.

And as mentioned, he needed money.

So he took with him a shipload of slaves:

as I remember, skilled Gallic leatherworkers

that one could get rid of down there with profit.

Naturally, it was smuggling.

The big slave traders of Asia Minor had old contracts with our harbors,

as well as with the Greek and Syrian ones,

which ensured them a monopoly of slave transport in both directions.

The slave trade, you see, was a well-organized business branch

backed with much capital, Roman too.

On the slave market in Delos,

up to ten thousand head were sometimes sold in a single day.

The slave traders' links with the capital traders were close and well-organized.

Only later, when the City set up its own slave trade,

was there friction with the export trust of Asia Minor.

Our tax farmers, under the protection of the Roman eagle and in deepest peacetime,

arranged regular slave hunts in the Provinces of Asia Minor.

The Cilician and Syrian firms resisted the competition,

which they thought unfair, as best they could.

The struggle for slave monopoly soon led to a quite beautiful sea war.

Transport ships were captured and slave cargoes confiscated in all directions.

Roman firms insulted Asia Minor ones, and Asia Minor pirates Roman ones.

C went in winter, when storms made one safer from the Asia Minor corsairs.

But they still captured him.

They took his cargo and put him in custody.

As you know from history books, he was treated with utmost delicacy.

They left him his doctor and manservants,

and even listened patiently to his poems.

The good people of Asia Minor even put up with this brutality and remained polite.

He only had to pay the damages, which were calculated by cargo size.

It was 20 talents.

The rest I'm telling you I have from Proconsul Junius,

who then officiated down there and whom I got to know as an old man.

He investigated the affair, because a big scandal blew up.

C then turned, through messengers, to the towns of Asia Minor for the money.

He hid that it was damages for slave trading,

and claimed it was ransom extorted by pirates.

And he asked not for 20 talents, but for 50.

They were raised. He never paid them back.

Freed, he journeyed to Miletus, manned a couple of ships

with gladiator slaves, and took back from the Asians

the "ransom" as well as his slave cargo.

Moreover, he dragged to Pergamos not only the Asian corsair crew,

but also slave traders who'd sent it out, as well as all stocks of slaves there.

Summoned by Junius to explain, he demanded the Asians all be treated as pirates.

And when Junius refused and inquired too persistently for further details,

he journeyed under cover of darkness to Pergamos and by forged orders

had the Asians nailed to the cross so that they could testify nothing against him.

In addition, because he'd pulled a fast one over the terrible "pirates,"

by jokingly threatening them with crucifixion and then doing so,

he acquired a reputation for humor with the historians,

Totally unwarranted.

He didn't have a grain of humor. But he had initiative.

I don't understand how by then he already had the power for all that.

He has as much power as any puppy from a Senatorial family.

They did what they wanted.

You shouldn't forget that C had merchants hanged here,

if you want to measure what difficulties Junius had as a result.

It wasn't yet the case that the Asia Minor firms could officially be called pirates.

Now they're called pirates in the history books.

Since they're written by us, naturally we bring our own view of things.

But even then a moral campaign against the Asians had been started in Rome

with a heap of money.

It was claimed they were procuring their wares in an unlawful way.

Indeed, some even reproached them for inhuman treatment of their wares.

At the same time it was clear that the wares seized by governors in campaigns

suffered far more in transportation.

To the military it was all the same how many head arrived.

The traders, on the other hand, lost money with each man,

and thus provided sanitary freighting.

But only years after the little incident we're discussing

did Roman firms succeed in making their cause Rome's cause.

They helped the mood in the Forum a bit

by having a few Roman grain ships opportunely captured

by some sort of Greek freebooters.

Only then could they scream for state help

and demand application of the pirate law.

But the City didn't get the Roman war fleet for its struggle against Asian competition

without a struggle.

In this too, morever, C played a role, even if a discreet one.

When in the year 87 the People's Tribune Gabinus

demanded from the Senate on behalf of the City

that the Roman war fleet be given to Pompey to fight the "pirates,"

he was nearly lynched by milords the landowners.

They hand long-term contracts with the Asians,

and could tolerate no interruption or reduction of slave imports:

their giant estates were not manageable without slaves.

They had no wish to give the City a monopoly in slave imports.

They feared monopoly prices.

The City called upon the people.

The Democratic Clubs went into action.

Naturally it didn't happen without a little demagogy.

To the people one must speak in popular style.

They emphasized ( C, too, was one of the orators ) the cheap slave prices

of the Asia Minor firms, through which Roman artisans were deprived of bread.

Among small farmers bitterness at the Senate's opposition was quite universal.

Use of slaves by large estates weighed horribly on the small peasant holdings.

They hoped to be able to throttle not only the slave traders of Asia Minor,

but also the whole slave trade.

In Etruria, the Senate had to send in the army against raging peasants.

The municipal proletariate, too, suffered from the fact

that entrepreneurs were ruining artisans' wages with cheap slave labor.

However scales were turned against them,

when slave import firms, young and strong in capital,

contrived a small rise in wheat prices and spread the rumor

that pirates were obstructing import of wheat.

And naturally money was poured out on all sides.

Pompey, like the other lictors, was always preceded by men with sealed envelopes.

So at the people's assembly, people only laughed

when old Catulus of the Senate, after a flowery enumeration of Pompey's merits,

beseeched that such a man not be exposed to the dangers of a war.

And when he cried in despair, "Whom will you have left if you lose this one?"

they shouted, grinning, "You!"

And when another speaker warned of handing over such power to a single man,

they raised such a shriek that a raven which was flying over the market

fell stunned by it into the assembly.

It was probably on its way to fetch its share of the public money.

Yet the whole fuss would have been of no use

if they'd not pressed into a dozen Senators' hands

a heap of sahres in the slave import firms.

Only now did the affair become a national affair

and Pompey get the war fleet for the City.

The price of wheat fell by half,

in three months the sea was cleaned of Asian competition,

and immediately thereupon Pompey, through a mere amendment, so to speak,

got the supreme command in Asia.

He fetched the slaves.

You understand, the little man voted twice in succession for the same man.

But he didn't do the same thing twice.

His naval war could pass as a blow against the slave trade,

but his land war meant slave trade on the largest scale.

Half a year later the slave market in Rome was flooded out,

this time by Roman firms.

Moreover, Cicero made his maiden speech at this time.

He spoke for conferring the supreme command on Pompey.

Where he got his honorarium you can work out for yourself

I saw him only twice in ten years. What do you want to know about him?

Were you in Gaul with him?

Yes, sir, we were with him. Three legions, sir.

Did you see him from close up?

500 paces once, 1,000 paces the other time.

Once, if you want to know exactly, at a parade in Lucus,

which meant four hours extra drill.

The other time at the embarcation for Britannia.

He was much loved?

He was thought smart.

But the simple man had confidence in him?

Provisions weren't bad. He say to that, so they said.

Were you in the Civil War?

O yes. On Pomey's side.

How so?

I belonged to the legion he'd squeezed out of Pompey.

He gave it back before the Civil War broke out.

I see.

Tough luck. I lost my indemnity. And he paid very decent indemnities.

But I could not choose.

Why did you become a soldier?

Long ago, sir.

Don't you know anymore?

You're a stubborn one.

I went into the army because I was recruited.

My home is in the region of Setia, if that means anything to you.

A Latin. If I hadn't been a Roman citizen,

they wouldn't have been able to recruit me.

Would you have rather stayed where your home is?

That, no. We were already four boys.

That was too many for the couple of hides of land.

Nor could we hire ourselves out to one of the large estates,

because they preferred to take freedmen, who couldn't be recruited.

And besides, they had their slaves.

Are your brothers still on the farm?

How should I know? Hardly likely, sir. With the wheat prices.

You have Sicilian wheat in Italy, you see, that's so much cheaper.

Already in my day, even the troops were fed only with Sicilian wheat.

And you yourself have looked for land again only now?

Yes, with my years one is not a soldier any more.

Yes, the land question was not solved, and it will never be solved. Impossible.

Your business isn't very great now either, is it?

We little men can't keep up. For that one needs slaves.

Did you hear anything about the Democratic Clubs in your youth?

I think so. When I was in the capital, I voted once.

But if it was for the Democratic Praetor, I don't know any more.

I got 50 sestertii - a lot of money.

I think the Democrats were for settling the land question?

Really? Weren't they for giving free grain to the unemployed?

That too.

But that's precisely what ruined the price of grain.

But it one was in the town, as you were then, it was still good to get cheap bread?

Yes, in the town it was necessary. There one was unemployed.

But for your people in Latium you think it was a bad thing?

There the low price of wheat ruined everything?

Yes. That and the many slaves. We were bringing them in now.

From Gaul, etc. Difficult, eh? politics!

What did Caesar look like then?

Worn out.

Jurist Afranius Carbo. It's a rotten habit of you young people

to laugh when the subject of the ideals trade has brought the world comes up.

You're just imitating the sneers of a few high-born idlers.

Is heroism seen only in war? If yes, is commerce not war?

Words like "peaceful trading" may inspire ambitious young merchants:

they have no place in history. Trade is never peaceful.

Boundaries which commodities can't cross are crossed by troops.

Among the woolspinner's tools is not only the loom, but also the catapult.

And in addition, commerce still has its own war.

An unbloody war, yes, but nevertheless a deadly one, I think.

Hunger for bread kills those who have it, and those who don't.

And not only does hunger for bread kill, appetite for oysters kills too.

In spite of this, it's true trade brought a humane touch to human relations.

It must have been in a businessman's brain that the first peaceful thought arose

- the idea of the utility of mild action.

You understand, the idea that in an unbloody war

one could secure greater advantages than in a bloody war.

In fact, sentence of death by starvation is somewhat milder than by sword.

Just as a milk cow's lot is pleasanter than a fattened swine's.

A trader must have hit on the idea that one can get more out of a man than just his entrails.

But don't forget in all this that "Live and let live," the great humane maxim,

surely still means "live" for the milk drinker, "let live" for the cow.

And when you consider history, what conclusion do you reach?

If ideals can only be taken seriously if blood has flowed for them,

then ours, those of Democracy, must be taken very seriously.

A lot of blood flowed for them.

Tiberius Gracchus was slain for them by Senators' sons with chair legs,

and 300 of ours with him.

None of the dead showed traces of iron weapons.

Their corpses were thrown into the Tiber.

The Senatorial general Manius Aquillius had offered a whole Province of Asia Minor

for sale to the kings of Pontus and Bythinia.

The Pontine king offered more, and the Senate ratified the sale.

"There are three tendencies in the Senate," said Gracchus.

"The first is for the sale; it is bribed by the King of Pontus.

"The second is against the sale; it is bribed by the King of Bythinia.

"The third is silent; it is bribed by both kings."

The Senate answered him with the chair legs.

That was in 620, so more than a century ago.

Thirteen years later Gaius Gracchus insisted

that the grain requisitioned in the Spanish Provinces be paid for,

that peasants be sent as colonisers to conquered Africa,

that Italians be accepted as citizens,

that taxes instead of tributes be imposed in the Provinces,

that the State income be controlled by businessmen.

And a horde of Senators chased him down the slope to the bank of the Tiber.

He sprained a foot, and had himself stabbed by his slave in a suburban park

so as not to fall into their hands.

His head was cut off and paid for by a Senator.

21 years passed, in which the Italian peasant and the Roman artisan

beat the slave bands of Sicily, Jugurtha's Numidian troops,

the Cimbrians and the Teutons.

And one December day in 654

the Democrats were driven together into the Market,

and then up to the Capitol, where their water was cut off so they had to surrender.

They were cooped up in the town hall, young noblemen clambered onto the roof,

took off the tiles, and smashed the prisoners' heads with them.

Then the Italian peasant and the Roman artisan conquered

conquered half Asia and Egypt as well, and it was time for a new blood-letting.

Sulla undertook it, and this time the work was thorough:

4000 of ours, counting modestly - that is, counting only the wealthy,

only those who belonged to the City.

I'm not speaking of butcheries like after the battle at Porta Collina,

where 3000 prisoners were led to the farmhouse in the Campus Martius

and slaughtered to the last man, so that in the nearby Temple of Bellona,

where Sulla was just then holding a sitting of the Senate,

the clanking of weapons and groans of the dying could be heard clearly.

And the affair was not at an end, neither the agitation nor its throttling.

Just eight years before Catilina's rebellion,

the Democratic general Sertorius was cut down by Senators as he was eating.

Two held his arms, and one struck his sword through his throat.

All that had passed, but none of it forgotten,

when Caius Julius again raised the Democratic banners.

Every paving stone of Rome was drenched with the blood of the people.

My father could still show me the place where they'd chased Caius Gracchus.

Two cypresses stood there. I can still see them in front of me.

We've forgotten we're plebians. You are, Spicer is, and I am.

Don't say it doesn't matter any more today.

Precisely that is what was achieved: that it doesn't matter any more today.

That's Caesar for you.

Compared to that, what are the couple of old-style battles,

the couple of shaky contracts with a couple of native tribes he may have made!

The City was a creation of the Gracchi.

It was they who handed over to trade the taxes and tolls of the two Asias.

It was the ideas of the Gracchi that Caius Julius took up.

Their fruit was: Imperium.

Vastius Alder, writer. Yet that's how everything was done.

At the appropriate time,

when investigations of embezzled money threatened,

one always repeated the threat of the foul air from below,

mumbled something about revolution, made a vague gesture in the direction of the suburbs.

The police understood and became more tactful.

A passing reference to the hungry masses (in terse military prose )

and the Senate cheered again.

One was naturally against this stinking tide oneself.

One wiped off with disgust the dirt splashed on one's toga.

One knew they'd use their "liberation"

to get their crippled bastards on the Vestal Virgins' laps,

to grow radishes instead of chrysanthemums in the greenhouses,

to seal the holes in their barracks with priceless Greek canvases,

to shit on grammar

- always excused by a couple of literati due to neglected education.

One knew all that - one had Greek culture.

One knew, but had to make politics.

One made politics till finally one got the tidal wave into the curia,

or at least its foam -

No hungry peasants, of course, just their tormentors, the usurers.

No bankrupt artisans of course, just the mortgage-holders.

No, the gentleman didn't forget "misery,"

the great Democrat remembered "the despair of the pauperized."

What else could he have blackmailed the pauperized with?

The Senate was too small. It had to be enlarged.

The privilged robbers were too few. They had to be supplemented by unprivileged robbers.

Under the dictator's threatening eye,

those their police brought the stolen goods to shook hands with those who'd stolen them.

What of the leprosy one had promised to suppress, exclude, decimate,

for so many sealed envelopes?

Now, wasn't it somewhat decimated when it streamed into the curia?

Wasn't it just a small part of all the leprosy?

It was surely only the part of the leprosy that could jingle with money.

A very small part.

But strong. And loud.

One must shout if one wants to bargain.

Look at the Senate: a market hall.

The Catlina affair put C on top.

It's true it brought the Democrat "Party" to the dogs,

but equally it brought him on top in the Party.

The defeat was huge,

but if they still wanted something from the defeated, they had to go to him.

He even took the kicks.

The Democratic cause had really gone to the dogs.

The Senate had accepted that repression of the City would cost something:

wheat for the unemployed ate up an eighth of the state's budget each year,

25 million sestertii.

But the money wasn't thrown away, not to mention it wasn't its own.

Increase in state income from Asiatic conquests more than doubled it.

The City's share had considerably decreased.

And "great" Pompey now had to consider

if he could really ask the Senate for more than a triumph.

The Democratic organizations, on which he could have depended in autumn,

were in ruins.

The City had betrayed the little man

according to all the rules of the art, except the rule that prescribes

that the victim shall not notice anything.

After brutal, definitive extermination of the Catilinians,

a change of mood had occurred in the broad masses.

The victors of Pistoria told of the bravery of the desperate insurgents,

in whose packs not a crust of bread had been found.

They told it in run-down, fungus-ridden tenement houses,

and to people who were in the hands of the banks

or else possessed nothing at all.

And the insurrection had beenopposed by the Democrat Cicero,

and for this honor had "great" Pompey contended with him.

Pompey had become unpopular.

But the Senate had the power. The capital's police were doubled;

its files were loaded with compromising documents.

The street clubs were completely dissolved,

even the gladiators' teams were dissolved.

Everywhere in Italy the Senate could muster fresh, trustworthy legions

from the peasantry, whenever it seemed necessary.

The peasants had no interest in a solution to the land question

which entailed dumping the town's unemployed on their necks as competition.

As if the insane slave imports of this Pompey hadn't been enough already!

And the City was as bankrupt as it could be.

The City longed more than ever for Pompey.

It urgently needed a "strong man."

It expected real energy from him.

The forum resounded with his fame.

His genius is proven, said the bankers, he showed it in Asia.

If he put an end to Mithridates, why shouldn't he end our Cato?

The man has a reputation to lose.

Naturally C was waiting for Pompey.

If Pompey came with legions,

there'd be police inquiries into the January events,

which would have to start at once,

if he resigned his office with the police, in the autumn.

The moment he'd cease to be the judge, he'd be the criminal.

So he was watching out for the dictator Pompey.

But the great Pompey shrouded himself in silence.

He was winding up his Asian affairs, and seemed to have no thought of politics.

He was still making contracts with the City for taxes and toll farming.

Of course, they required sanction from the Senate, but

he would certainly come with his legions

and contracts which victorious legions desired couldn't be bad.

The City displayed a cheerful, trusting air.

But prices for Asiatic stocks were remarkably low.

If you want to know the City's true views on war reports,

you have to read its stockmarket reports.

Pompey came not with his legions, but without them.

At the start of year 92, no one would have thought this possible

of the great conqueror of the two Asias.

Crassus, in mortal dispute with Pompey since their joint consulate,

had already fled before him to Macedonia in summer.

Even the Senate expected all sorts of comings and goings from Pompey,

who had landed at Brindisium with a giant fleet,

when Crassus reappeared on the Forum.

When C saw him, he knew Pompey would come without troops.

Crassus had his connections.

C sent for that same afternoon.

He was standing by a statue of Minerva,

and was giving a dozen slaves orders to pack.

He said,

"Pompey will come back as a private individual. Crassus is back again.

"I'm thinking of travelling off to my Province."

C left Rome in such haste that he didn't even seek the Senate's instructions

about his troops' strength, equipment or pay.

I believe the fame of his "magically fast journey" was spread by his many creditors.

But he didn't leave Rome without seeking the instructions of the Pulcher group.

It was in charge of the settlement

of the Etrurian iron mines' war supplies business with Pompey's army.

These mines, Italy's largest, were pretty much exhausted.

C's administration of Spain was in fact the first to succeed

according to reasonable - that is, businesslike - points of view.

From the historians you can't readily apprehend that.

For certain reasons, mainly so that C could celebrate a triumph,

he had to present the whole thing as a war.

They spoke of a war against mountain people who carried out

thieving raids in the valleys.

There was talk of a population that left its towns to flee into the mountains

and which had to be brought back.

That's the usual style of governors' reports.

C's procedure was far more interesting.

The main point, the really new thing,

was that he treated Spanish businessmen not only as Spaniards,

but also as businessmen.

He supported them, where he could, even against their own countrymen.

In the first place, pacification of Spain had to be accomplished.

To this end no means should be shunned, not even the most powerful.

His most famous civilizing measure

consisted of resettlement of the Lusitanian mountain population in the river valleys.

The Lusitanian merchants complained bitterly

about the absolute lack of labor power in the silver, copper and iron mines.

The mountain inhabitants preferred

contemplative pastoral life in the highlands to work in the mines.

The industrialists pointed out quite rightly

that on these inaccessible plateaus they were very successfully

avoiding the clutches of the tax officials.

For decades Roman governors had taken no notice

of the complaints of domestic commerce, and hadn't taken sides

in the struggle of the Lusitanian bourgeoisie

with the stubborn pastoral population.

The mountain people stood on a very low rung of civilization.

There were scarcely any slaves.

One was not in a position, without foreign help,

to exploit the important ore deposits,

partly because of primitive machinery,

partly because of lack of suitable labor power.

However Roman troops invaded only when, after C's arrival,

it became known that in these regions even human sacrifices were offered.

Liquidation of such barbarous conditions

called for speedy and merciless intervention.

It may lead to loss of human life, but will be worth it in the end.

Those Roman cohorts who, in the absence of any roads,

thought they were following a dried up river bed

and marched into an arm of the sea and got washed away by rising tide

with all war equipment and baggage, didn't lose their lives in vain.

On the same slopes stand today villas of native and Roman merchants.

And the mountain valleys which once were filled with

the noise of weapons and moans of the wounded,

resound today again with peaceful hammering in the ore quarries

and the merry cries of the slaves.

The short war did not pass without blood,

and not all of C's operations were fortunate.

But he was not unloved by the soldiers.

The gratuities he handed out were decent.

And he could with good conscience demand a triumph in Rome,

and to make up the required 5000 enemy killed, he didn't,

like certain other generals, have to count all the civilians who'd lost their lives.

Roman cohorts fought in this war shoulder to shoulder with native ones.

A third of the troops were Lusitanians.

Relations of the Roman tax farmers, and thereby of the City,

with the native bourgeoisie were the most cordial imaginable.

With help from the Pulcher group, C succeeded in obtaining

tax rebates for his Province by proving that the country had suffered

through his war operations.

Before the auction of the tax concessions

he arranged a settlement between various competitors and the Pulcher group,

so that the usual outbidding was prevented.

He left the mines in the hands of native businesses,

and obtained for the Lusitanians a moratorium on their debts.

He found a bearable mode by which the native industry

could continue working, and pay its debts through full employment

of the country's labor power.

Two thirds of the output of the mines currently went to the City.

The campaign in the mountains had yielded a rich booty in slaves.

But naturally that didn't settle the matter.

The former shepherds, used to the lazy life in the highlands,

left the towns again and again, and had to be brought back by force.

C did what he could.

His success was epoch-making,

and contributed more than anything else to making the new system popular.

Despite lowered tax assessments, the Empire's income was constantly increasing,

and the City had every reason to be satisfied.

It got ore - as much as it wanted.

Today it employs more than 40,000 slaves in the mines

and derives 45 million sestertii a year from the silver mines.

But C's share from pacification of the Province was also satisfactory.

The historians disagree about what he actually earned.

Brandus believes he only took money at all because he needed tangible proof

of the Spaniards' enthusiastic gratitute for his unselfishness.

He emphasies that C accepted voluntary donations exclusively.

Nepos believes people at the head of troops are too proud to beg,

and assumed he ordered the donations.

Some say he took money from his enemies; others, from his allies.

Some, it consisted of tributes; others, of shares in the silver mines.

Some, he was paid in Spain; others, in Rome.

All of them are right.

As everyone knows, C could do several things at once.

He made about 35 million sestertii in a single year.

When he came back, another man came back.

He'd shown what was hidden inside him.

He'd also shown what was hidden in a Province.

And his historic saying

that he'd rather be first in Spain than second in Rome was justified.

My confidence in him had proved well-founded.

Our small bank was no small bank anymore.

Open your fiery pit, o Hell.

Wreck, ruin, engulf, shatter with sudden force

the false betrayer, the murderous blood!