Lucullus Read online

  The photographic illustration of this book shows but a part of the rich coverage and artistic interpretation of the ancient world that has characterized Katie’s work. Her artistry extends beyond the photographic to engagement with the lasting influence of the Romans on the lands and peoples once under their domination; her insights into classical reception and history have been a sustaining influence on my work. Katie encouraged me to pursue this and related projects as part of the ongoing mortal quest to preserve the memory of great men and their deeds. As the first publication in which her colour photography has appeared, this volume is fittingly dedicated to her.

  Lee Fratantuono

  Delaware, Ohio, USA

  November 2016

  In festo S. Caeciliae

  Chapter 1

  From the Dawn of an Optimate Life

  Culinary Relics

  There is a taverna on the so-called Old Market Street in Chora on the Greek island of Naxos that is named the ‘Taverna Lucullus’.1 It is one of several such dining establishments scattered across the eastern Mediterranean.2 These restaurants serve as a curious survival of the popular memory of an almost forgotten hero of immense significance to Roman military, political, literary and, yes, gastronomical history.3 (Indeed, outside of the world of ancient military history and Classics, it is possible that the most enduring legacy of Lucullus is in the culinary arena.) The English adjective ‘lucullan’ has endured as a lasting lexical tribute (after a fashion) to the Roman statesman and general. The onomastic memory of Lucullus is thus centred on his association with the joys of a luxurious, even decadent table; his great accomplishments in Asia Minor – from Cappadocia to Pontus to Armenia – seemingly take second place to the fame of his table. This enduring memory of the man is rendered all the more striking by the fact that not a single hint of definitive information survives as to exactly what was served of either food or drink at the allegedly lavish dinners that Lucullus hosted. And the gastronomic memorial gives no credit to Lucullus’ many achievements in the worlds of both Roman politics and military adventure.

  A Man of His Age

  The present volume is a study of the life and (in particular) military achievements of one of the lesser-known figures of the Roman Republic, at least in the popular imagination. For many students and even scholars of Roman military history, Lucullus is little more than a notable republican of vague significance. But Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118–57/56 BC) represents in some ways the consummate hero of the Roman Republic.4 He was a military general of extraordinary ability, with an impressive résumé of achievement.5 He was also an inveterate patron and devotee of the arts and literature (a fact that may have played into the hands of his rivals and critics). His travels were among the most extensive of any Roman of his age; in some ways he may be considered an incarnation of the spirit of infectious enthusiasm and resolute determination that characterized Roman Republican colonization and overseas adventure – he simply saw and experienced more of the world than many of his contemporaries. There are negative attributes, to be sure, in the sum appraisal of his life – but no one who has taken the time to study the period closely has seriously called into question the significance of the tremendous victories he won over Rome’s Eastern enemies, no one either of his contemporaries or of subsequent historians of the Republic. Lucullus could well have become the Roman Alexander the Great; if Pompey was destined for the title, Lucullus paved the way. Among the great military and political figures of the late Republic, Lucullus also had a claim on the title of the most literary and philosophically inclined. Today, some might call him a Renaissance man, a polymath of astonishing range.

  Lucullus has also been shrouded in relative obscurity and unfamiliarity, largely due to the eclipse his fame and glory suffered in the wake of younger rivals and contemporaries, in particular Pompey and Caesar. In some ways he was fortunate in seemingly knowing when best to exit the stage of Roman history (this is something that was recognized even in antiquity); his ultimate fate could easily have been as violent as those that befell his more storied Roman colleagues. Instead, we shall find that Lucullus’ final years are more closely associated with rumours of luxurious decadence, mental decline and eventual dementia; part of our task will be to evaluate the evidence for these charges.6 He may well have been a victim of Alzheimer’s Disease, as some have speculated; he may have been accidentally poi-soned. His end, in any case, will prove an interesting story in itself.

  Our task will be primarily to examine the remarkable military career of a man who travelled to the distant Roman East and helped to establish a more or less lasting order throughout many of its more troubled realms – and, throughout, to study what factors contributed to the making of a Roman military genius. Along the way, we may discover that Lucullus deserves far more credit and praise for his military acumen and mastery of the arts of strategy and tactics than he has received. If Caesar is still a household name, and Pompey and Crassus relatively famous even among those with limited knowledge of Roman history, Lucullus has experienced a far less sympathetic treatment from the ravages of time and lost memory. If anything, Lucullus’ reputation hovers today between obscurity on the one hand, and the increasingly unfamiliar meaning of such references as ‘lucullan’ in matters of luxury and decadence. Throughout, our task will be to evaluate the charges brought against him, and to assess the validity of the indictment.

  But some questions deserve to be asked from the start and throughout our investigation of this military hero. We may ask why Lucullus failed in several important facets of his political and military careers. We may wonder what qualities in the man served him well, and which aspects of his personality and behaviour may have done him harm. We may seek to identify critical moments in his life, where a different decision might have spelled incalculably different consequences for the history of the Republic. These are the same problems that all biographers tackle; they stand at the heart of the ancient tradition of recording Lucullus’ life and memory.

  In an important sense, the story of Lucullus’ military life is a microcosm of the problems of the Republic in what some might call its dying years. It was an age of immensely talented men of arms, public speakers and indeed literary and poetic voices. It was a time of extraordinary expansion of the borders of the Roman world, of consolidation of gains and testing of new relations with foreign neighbours. It was an age of massive internal upheaval and turmoil, not least because of the eruption of the Spartacus slave war in Italy. For many of the more troubled and controversial periods in question, Lucullus was blessed to be far off in Asia. It is possible he stayed there too long – and equally possible that he did not stay long enough. Lucullus remains an enigma, though an enigma we do well to investigate closely. Along the way, we may discover some useful insights into the slow and inexorable collapse of a political and military system that had long ago outgrown the borders of the Italian peninsula.

  Lucullus’ life is reasonably well documented in surviving literature, though significant problems of interpretation of the evidence remain. We shall see that we are not able to be certain of the definitive chronology of select key events in Lucullus’ life, or of the motivation and rationale behind several important twists of fate. These difficulties, however, are relatively minor and do not impede an appreciation and better understanding of this quintessential late republican life.

  Military Acumen

  The main focus of the present work is on Lucullus’ military achievements, most notably the conduct and prosecution of his wars against both Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia. It will be demonstrated that Lucullus was one of the finest military commanders of his age, a strategist and tactician of immense talent and ability, a versatile leader in the business of combat operations on both land and sea – indeed, perhaps the finest ‘amphibious’ commander in Roman military history, with only Pompey for serious rival. The Lucullus of military history will emerge as an underappreciated master of Roman military science, a general whose dip
lomatic skills were equally honed and finessed in the course of the long wars in the Roman East. And, we shall see, in terms of the lasting import of Lucullus’ work, the disposition of affairs beyond the Bosporus and the Euphrates for years to come would largely be the result of the achievements won by this protégé of Sulla.

  Names and Origins

  We may begin – as so often in the study of Roman personages – with names. ‘Lucius’ is one of the relatively few Roman ‘first names’ or praenomina; it is derived from the Latin noun lux, ‘light’ (and so our title ‘from the dawn of an optimate life’ for our subject). The nomen ‘Licinius’ refers to the clan or gens ‘Licinia’, a plebeian gens whose origins may have been Etruscan.7 ‘Lucullus’ is a cognomen, the third part of a Roman name that referred to a particular family. Some Romans are more commonly known today by their nomen (cf. Virgil, Ovid), and others by their cognomen (e.g., Cicero). Lucullus is in this latter category. Besides the Luculli, the Licinian clan could also boast the Crassi, the most famous of whom was Marcus Licinius Crassus (c. 115–53 BC), Lucullus’ almost exact contemporary – and another Roman who would find adventure in the East (with rather more fatal consequences).

  Lucullus was, strictly speaking, a plebeian – as were Crassus and Pompey. But as we shall see, many noble plebeians were more akin to traditional patricians in their political dealings than to the plebs or ‘common people’. Conversely, while Gaius Julius Caesar was a patrician (and one who could boast descent from Aeneas’ son Iulus and, ultimately, the goddess Venus), his sympathies were most decidedly popular and not traditional or senatorial.8 Lucullus was a plebeian, but his sensibilities and manner through his life were patrician (in contrast, his brother-in-law and antagonist, the patrician Publius Clodius Pulcher, would actually eventually pursue adoption into a plebeian family).9 Lucullus was no innovator (at least to any appreciable extent) in the political or social realms; his talents lay elsewhere. He was what we may label a traditionalist; his sympathies were with the preservation of senatorial prerogatives and the defence of the ancien regime, as it were. And unlike some of his contemporaries, Lucullus never wavered in his allegiances; a traditionalist optimate he was, and a traditionalist optimate he remained. Consistency and loyalty were high in his list of virtues; scholars may question whether these attributes played a part in the ultimate failure of some of his enterprises.

  The Evidence of Plutarch

  Lucullus is not infrequently cited in extant Greek and Latin literature. But our principal surviving source of evidence for his life is the biography of Plutarch (c. AD 46–120), the Greek scholar and man of letters who is justly celebrated for his parallel lives of noteworthy Greeks and Romans.10 Plutarch’s life of Lucullus is paired with his account of the Athenian statesman and military master Cimon (c. 510–450 BC); we shall return later to the significance of this comparison in terms of Lucullus’ military record.

  Plutarch offers the most complete extant account of Lucullus’ life; it is the single most important source of information we have for his military and other exploits. And that life encompassed some of the most tumultuous and dramatic years in the history of the Republic; Lucullus lived through the first half of a century that would witness what some would consider the death of the Republic. In some regards it is a paradigmatic life of a republican Roman; the history of Lucullus’ life is inextricably linked to the history of the Republic he served well in both peace and war. Like all ancient sources, it must be evaluated for its reliability and candour, its biases and prejudices. But without Plutarch’s life, our knowledge of Rome’s great Republican general would be unquestionably impoverished.11 As we shall see, Lucullus was one of those subjects of biography who held a special significance for Plutarch because of his connections to the author’s native Chaeronea in Boeotia. In the more general programme of Plutarch’s treatment of the Republic, Lucullus’ life is one of the key elements in the biographer/historian’s unfolding of the complicated story of the fall of the Republic.12 We do well to consider how improverished our undestanding of the man would be in the absence of the Plutarchan life.

  There are problems, however, that are attendant to having only one major surviving source. For many episodes of Lucullus’ life, we are essentially dependent on Plutarch’s account, and reliant on the biographer’s accuracy in forming a fair portrait of Lucullus’ life and experiences in both the political and military arenas.13 In other cases, we must resort to comparing Plutarch’s version with the accounts of others – in other words, the normal work of source criticism and analysis. For Plutarch, the life of Lucullus falls more or less neatly into two phases – first a long period marked by industry and careful planning and work, and the second a period that was defined by the luxurious decadence for which ‘lucullan’ has become a watchword, however increasingly abstruse and recherché. But even the binary division of Lucullus’ life by Plutarch is not without controversy; the biographer is ready, we shall see, to pass critical judgment on the last part of his subject’s life, but without clear indication that the criticism outweighs the positive qualities of Lucullus’ earlier life. We are left with an enigma, a strange Republican life that will prove to be replete with lessons about the military and political realities of the age in which it was lived.

  The Virtue of Pietas

  How does Plutarch commence his biographical portrait of a man who will emerge as something of a mystery? Plutarch’s Lucullus is presented from the start as a man outstanding for what to a Roman would be defined as the virtue of pietas. The English derivative ‘piety’ does not satisfactorily render or translate the untranslatable. Pietas defines the ideal relationship between human beings and the immortals; it provides a framework for organizing and defining familial connections and ties of kinship and friendship. In the case of Lucullus, pietas was manifested in the young Roman’s decision (in concert with his brother Marcus, who was one or at most two years younger) to seek to prosecute the man who had prosecuted his father. There is a moral dimension to Plutarch’s record; certain defining traits and characteristics of the man are presented from the start. For Plutarch, these characteristics fashioned and shaped Lucullus’ reactions to a variety of situations throughout his life, and in the end they may prove to be as much emblematic of an age as of an individual.

  Further, Plutarch notes in the very opening lines of the life that Lucullus was the grandson of a consul, and the nephew of the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus (c. 160–91 BC)14 – but the son of parents of somewhat less glorious a record. Lucullus is implicitly presented, we might think, as a study in contradictions. He was born into a family and social milieu that afforded examples of both good and bad – the Roman exempla of achievement and moral excellence, and of depravity, crime and infamous disgrace. The navigation of those opposites would be the challenge that would confront the young plebeian noble. By the end of his relatively long life (at least by ancient standards), Lucullus would offer both positive and negative exempla, and stand forth as a seeming study in conflicting displays of character and behaviour.

  We may observe that Lucullus’ formative years and entry into political and public life were accompanied by questions of loyalty and duty. Toward the end of his career in the military and his difficult return to Rome after the long campaigns in Asia and Armenia, it is possible that Lucullus suffered deeply from a sense of a lack of appreciation of his talents and devotion to obligation, and a feeling that the virtues that had marked his early years and career were no longer so valued in Republican Rome. Lucullus was born into a difficult age and a family that had enjoyed a checkered reputation, yet by the time of his death, he could at least lay claim to the unquestioned title of being the most notable scion of his line.

  The Defence of His Father

  Some salient details and conclusions may be offered here. Lucullus’ introduction to public life was firmly invested in the traditions of familial pietas, of a son’s defence and support of his father, an image that for the Romans had its origins i
n the Trojan hero Aeneas’ rescue of his father Anchises from the burning ruins of Priam’s fabled city. The brothers Luculli failed in their attempt to prosecute successfully the man who had driven their father into exile – but the fraternal attempt at filial pietas did not go without notice and reward. It was an act of daring in a troubled political climate, a deed invested with the spirit of devotion to one’s parents that so inspired the Roman imagination. For the Romans of Lucullus’ day, filial respect mattered more than the question of whether or not Lucullus Senior was guilty and justly condemned; the devotion of a son to his father transcended any concerns with what we might label a vendetta, or revenge for revenge’s sake.15 Servilius had been responsible for the prosecution and disgrace of Lucullus Senior; the question was not one of the father’s guilt, but of the duty of his sons to show respect and honour to their paterfamilias, notwithstanding his crime. And in the wake of Lucullus’ father’s exile, the son assumed the burden and responsibility of being the head of the household.

  What exactly had happened?16 Lucullus’ father – confusingly for students of Roman history, both the father and the grandfather had the same name as their more famous descendant – had been sent to Sicily in 103–102 BC to quell the uprising that would later be known to history as the Second Servile or Slave War (his son Marcus Lucullus would have the chance to restore something of his father’s honour in his part in ending the Spartacus War years later – indeed, if Lucius is an undeservedly unsung hero in some circles, his brother has suffered even more in this regard).