The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  Despite holding a priesthood of Jupiter and the prestigious office of pontifex maximus, nothing survives to illuminate Caesar’s religious outlook bar his unshakeable belief in a goddess Fortuna directly concerned with his own destiny and his hunch concerning the benefits of heavenly paternity, however remote. Later, in a gesture that combined family piety and caste complacency, he built a temple to Venus Genetrix. He also made use of his aedileship in 65 BC to challenge convention by hosting, after a delay of twenty years, funeral games in honour of his father, another Gaius Julius Caesar. The 320 pairs of gladiators who appeared in front of Rome’s crowd that year dressed in elaborate silver armour testified not only to Caesar’s lavish generosity but to the distinction of the older Caesar and, by implication, the whole Julian gens, including of course Caesar himself.

  Patricians the Caesars may have been: in recent generations they were mostly strangers to prominence or effective power. Caesar’s father died when his son was sixteen. He collapsed putting on his shoes. It was symptomatic of decline and fall, as was the marriage Caesar père had organized for his son to the daughter of a wealthy equestrian. (The teenage Caesar subsequently broke off the engagement – or terminated the marriage if indeed the young couple were actually married – choosing instead Cornelia, daughter of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, four times consul, fellow patrician and, at the time, the most powerful man in Rome. It ought not to surprise us.) A recent history of family mediocrity, added to his marriage to Cornelia, would play a pivotal role in determining the course of Caesar’s life.

  Caesar’s legacy has been debated since the moment of his slaughter. His great-nephew Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, exploited the memory of his murdered forebear to destroy for ever the Republic which in its turn had destroyed him. It was Octavian who had the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great removed from its shrine so that he could honour Alexander in death with flowers and a golden crown. The great-nephew discerned the same parallels which afterwards inspired Plutarch and had inspired Caesar himself. Alexander, of course, was not the only recipient of a golden crown in Octavian’s lifetime. It was symbolically his own reward for realizing through conquest, mass-manipulation and deft political sleight of hand what Caesar’s less compromising self-promotion had foretold but flunked: an autocracy – monarchy by another name – in place of that ‘democratic’ oligarchy which was the proud boast of the Republic. The conquest of an empire, including Caesar’s own contributions of Gaul and Lusitania, made Rome rich: Gaul alone yielded an annual tribute of forty million sesterces (and incidentally cleared Caesar’s chronic debt). Caesar’s heirs enjoyed riches and empire. Provincial legions and provincial governors, both products of empire, would ultimately destabilize the settlement created by Caesar’s heirs – witness the turbulent ‘king-making’ of the Year of the Four Emperors – just as Caesar had exploited legionary loyalty and the fruits of provincial governorship to provoke, and in time prevail in, civil war.

  Covetousness killed him: the longing for absolute power. ‘The animal known as king is by nature carnivorous,’ Cato the Elder had said in the century before Caesar’s birth;10 in Rome, kingship remained an impermissible aspiration. That Caesar himself betrayed aspects of ‘carnivorousness’ is undeniable: Plutarch estimates that a million Gauls were killed in the Gallic campaign, with another million taken into slavery. Too late in the wake of conquest to repudiate Mark Antony’s gift of a crown at the festival of the Lupercalia or to spurn the crowd’s acclaim with the statement ‘I am Caesar and no king.’ Too late in 46 to demand the erasing of a statue inscription which labelled him a demi-god. His face appeared on coins – a first for a living Roman; like the monarchs of the East he had humoured divinity to the extent of permitting his own statue to be set up in Rome’s Temple of Quirinus. His cult was integrated within state worship: his lieutenant Mark Antony was nominated its priest. In February 44, Caesar was appointed dictator in perpetuum, king in all but name. He had held the dictatorship before, as early as December 49: opportunities for repudiation had surely not been lacking. Plutarch asserts without equivocation that ‘the most open and deadly hatred towards him was produced by his passion for the royal power’.11 Like Gaius and Domitian after him, he paid for the tyrannous impulse with his life.

  In the last years of the family’s aristocratic obscurity, a daughter of the Julii married a man considered by Romans a novus homo or ‘new man’ (one whose family had not previously entered the senate and held the consulship): Gaius Marius. Among the outstanding generals of Roman history and elected seven times a consul, Marius was rich, famous and prominent. He was also closely associated with one of late-Republican Rome’s two loose political groupings which, while not equivalent to the political parties of modern democracies, represent a roughly similar bifurcation of opinion. Neither group was motivated by altruism; both targeted power. The Populares apparently embraced the aspirations of the mob, setting popularism against the dominance of Roman politics by the senate. The Optimates championed the interests of ‘the best’, where ‘the best’ were drawn for the most part from the city’s oldest and grandest families. Theirs was a defence of the status quo, but since many of the Populares were themselves aristocrats, it was clearly an evolving status quo on the brink of transformation. In answer to his own question, ‘And who are the best?’, Cicero scorned impartiality and hazarded an increase in the Optimates’ power base. ‘They are of all ranks and infinite in number – senators, municipal citizens, farmers, men of business, even freedmen... They are the well-to-do, the sound, the honest who do no wrong to any man. The object at which they aim is quiet with honour. They are the conservatives of the State.’12 Marius led the Populares. After his death, he was succeeded by Caesar’s father-in-law Cinna – strong ties twice over on Caesar’s part.

  At the outset of his career, Popularist sympathies unexpectedly placed Caesar on the back foot. ‘Quiet with honour’ held no interest for the tall but slight young man already nurturing vigorous ambitions (though almost certainly not at this stage the settlement he ultimately achieved in the months preceding his assassination). Like many men in Rome, he found himself opposed to Sulla, who in 82 BC, in pursuit of a long-term, self-appointed purpose of preventing the city from being overwhelmed by a single faction – Marius’ Populares – seized control by military force. Sulla revived the role of dictator which Caesar would later annex. This granted him a temporary award of supreme power and allowed him to outlaw any whom he considered enemies of the state. It was a process known as proscription which placed prices on heads while stripping its victims of their estates, citizenship, legal protection and ultimately their lives. At eighteen, in possession of a single priesthood and no fortune, well born but not well known, Caesar lacked the public profile to provoke proscription. Instead, Sulla ordered him to divorce his wife (Cinna’s daughter) and forfeit her dowry to the state’s depleted coffers. Invariably cash-strapped, Caesar yielded the money. His refusal to divorce Cornelia left him no alternative but to flee. He escaped from the dictator’s agents only once his mother Aurelia had used her influence with the Vestal Virgins and a number of prominent kinsmen to obtain from Sulla a grudging and prophetic pardon: ‘Bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy.’ Rightly Sulla discerned in Caesar many Mariuses. Like his deceased uncle, Caesar would retain ever after Popularist sympathies and the mistrust of the Optimates. He learned early to exploit the support of the Roman masses to advance his personal agenda. Eschewing, and often prevented from, cooperation with the senate, his behaviour instead demonstrates a repeating pattern of crowd-pleasing spectaculars in public and illicit political manoeuvring behind closed doors.

  Before then, scandal swiftly followed success. It is a combination which recurs throughout Suetonius’ Lives: oscillating good and bad – leavened with scurrilous details, tittle-tattle and superstition – alternately humanize and demonize the author’s portraits of Rome’s rulers. In Caesar’s c
ase, both success and scandal arose during his first overseas military posting. In the province of Asia, alongside its governor Marcus Minucius Thermus, the nineteen-year-old Caesar took part in the siege of Mytilene. There he acquitted himself with such conspicuous and outstanding valour – although the sources do not divulge details – that he won the civic crown, Rome’s highest award for bravery and one traditionally reserved for exceptional gallantry in the protection or preservation of another man’s life.

  Perhaps the oak-leaf chaplet which marked the award turned his head. On his subsequent dispatch to Bithynia, entrusted with a diplomatic mission of persuading King Nicomedes IV to send a fleet to Asia at Thermus’ request, Caesar forgot himself. He indulged in a dalliance with the ageing Eastern monarch. Short in duration, nevertheless it dogged him for the remainder of his life. That the teenage war hero should have consented to be buggered by a geriatric royal pederast – one version has Caesar arrayed in purple robes, recumbent and alluring on a golden couch, an image better suited to his future mistress Cleopatra – would continue to titillate Caesar’s enemies for the next four decades. For there was a subversive quality to such submission: an instance of Roman vigour in thrall to the degeneracy of the East; a client king dominant over Rome’s representative; decrepitude corrupting and overwhelming youth; a suggestion that Caesar was open to influences Rome would not condone. Heedless or unaware of the rumours he generated, Caesar tarried at Nicomedes’ court. Afterwards he compounded that initial indiscretion by returning to Bithynia on unnamed business which Roman gossips derided with undisguised scepticism.

  Suetonius describes Caesar as seducing ‘many illustrious women’. His paramours included queens and consorts, notably Eunoe the Moor and Cleopatra. Closer to home, his ‘unbridled and extravagant’ intrigues did not baulk at the wives of political associates. On Servilia, mother of his best-known assassin Brutus, he lavished a magnificent pearl valued at six million sesterces: it was Servilia he loved best. In 81 BC, in Bithynia, his surrender to Nicomedes is a lone instance both of sexual passivity and of homosexuality. Caesar’s enemies clung to it with relish. His wholesale cuckolding made him fair game. Nicomedes’ seduction was the only recompense for small fry blistered by the trail of this dazzling comet. Their taunts retained a bitter tang absent from the baser ribaldry of Caesar’s troops, for whom an old man’s cock was laughing matter. Suetonius claims the soldiers’ ditty became proverbial: ‘All the Gauls did Caesar vanquish, Nicomedes vanquished him.’ In the long term, damage (save to the pride of a libidinous Lothario) was limited. Nero, the last of Julius’ line, would pay more heavily for playing the woman’s part and subverting Roman expectations of male and female, active and passive, dominant and submissive.

  In Rome, Sulla surrendered the dictatorship. (That action would afterwards earn him Caesar’s contempt, a statement in itself of the value the younger man attached to power.) He retired and shortly died. He had declared war on his fellow Romans and been rewarded with sole rule. In the process Caesar was one of many men forced into exile. Undoubtedly, personal animosity aside, Sulla’s record impressed him. When he returned to Rome in 78 BC, Caesar did not accept the invitation of the new leader of the Populares, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, to join him against the Optimates, proof that ambition was balanced by a degree of political acumen. He turned his hand to law instead, prosecuting the former governor of Macedonia, the prominent Sullan Gnaeus Cornelius Dolabella, for irregularities in his governorship. Although Caesar lost the case, he won friends and reputation. He also made powerful enemies. Fleeing voluntarily on this occasion, he headed for Rhodes and lessons in rhetoric from a leading teacher of oratory, Apollonius Molo. But he was stopped halfway. The hiatus was caused not by politics but money. Pirates took Caesar prisoner. For their bumptious cargo they demanded the large ransom of twenty talents of silver. Caesar set his own value at more than double that amount, the enormous sum of fifty talents.

  In total, Caesar spent thirty-eight days as the pirates’ prisoner. In Plutarch’s version, the experience singularly failed to unnerve him. Rather, he treated the men, whom he openly dismissed as barbarians, as shipmates-cum-bodyguards, a captive audience for the speeches and poems with which he diverted the tedium. The fifty-talent ransom was probably provided by the city of Miletus, to which Caesar hastened once the pirates had set him free. There he commandeered a clutch of vessels and returned to the pirates’ ship, where former captive turned captor. He took the same pirates prisoner and requested the governor of Asia to order their execution at Pergamum. That last functionary delaying, Caesar himself organized their death by crucifixion. It was no more than the promise he had made the pirates when first they captured him. Their mistake had been to ‘[attribute] his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth’.13 Suetonius reports the same incident to illustrate Caesar’s ‘mercy’: ‘When he had got hold of the pirates who had captured him, he had them crucified since he had sworn beforehand that he would do so, but ordered that their throats be cut first.’ In its way it was a variant on Caesar’s theme of veni, vidi, vici, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Dispassionately he had fulfilled his threats; justice (as Caesar saw it) had been done and seen to be done, even if numerous legal irregularities were suggested by the rapid process of its accomplishment – a man with no official standing demanding the payment of his ransom by a provincial city, then bypassing the procedures for justice ordinarily administered by the governor. For the next four decades, Caesar would pursue just such a course. He himself supplied courage, bravado, energy, an inflated sense of personal worth, and impatience with the minutiae that clogged the political process. In return, resistant to scrutiny, he expected compliance and enhancement of his dignitas.

  Caesar was elected to a vacancy in the College of Pontiffs in 73 BC; three years later, he served as military tribune, an undertaking in his life of which virtually nothing is known. After adventures, acclaim and a degree of notoriety, it represented a point of embarkation, first steps on that ladder of magistracies which constituted the senatorial career of many of Rome’s aristocratic young men, the cursus honorum, or course of honours. These first appointments reveal neither novelty nor distinction: the path was preordained. Earlier, probably in 76 BC, Cornelia had given birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter called Julia. Cornelia herself died around 69 BC. Her death, like her life, aside from cementing first loyalties to the Popularist cause, apparently made only limited impact on the direction of Caesar’s fate. His decision to hold a large public funeral for Cornelia, the first of its sort in Rome for such a young woman, increased his popularity with the mob, who interpreted the gesture sentimentally as proof of affection between husband and wife (Nicomedes and numerous affairs on Caesar’s part notwithstanding). Later he would hold a similar funeral for Cornelia’s daughter.

  In the wake of bereavement came a departure. In this instance, Caesar’s destination was Further Spain, at that stage a province of limited attractiveness to a sophisticated, cosmopolitan Roman still not thirty. He could not have chosen to serve out his quaestorship so far from the capital; he remained no longer than he had to, returning to Rome after a year. In Spain, however, in the city of Gades (modern Cadiz), Caesar came face to face with a statue of Alexander the Great and the certain knowledge of the magnitude of the task that lay ahead of him. Perhaps that encounter shaped his response to those offices which he assumed on his return to Rome. Caesar served as aedile in 65 (two years ahead of the minimum age qualification of thirty-seven) and praetor in 62. On both occasions he found himself coupled in office with Marcus Bibulus, inimical and Optimate, a staid conservative. In the case of the aedileship, Caesar exploited the appointment for maximum political capital. Rigorously he curried the favour of the masses and consistently overshadowed his less dynamic partner in a dazzling and extravagant programme of public games and spectacles which included those belated gladiatorial funeral games held in honour of his father; he also restored to positions of prominence trophies of victorie
s against the Germans won by Marius, his uncle by marriage (previously Sulla had destroyed these).

  In 64 BC, proof that the direction of Rome’s political winds was changing, Caesar presided as a magistrate over the trials of those who had accepted payments from Sulla in return for killing proscribed men. Generous to the defeated as he would remain in every important contest in his life bar his treatment of Germans and Gauls, he did not approach the task in a spirit of vindictiveness. Instead the undertaking provided him with further opportunities to lay claim to Marius’ legacy, a rich ‘inheritance’ of populist distinction and martial prowess. At the end of 63, as a result of further large-scale spending, Caesar won the position of pontifex maximus, head of the College of Pontiffs to which he already belonged and chief priest of the state cult. This prestigious appointment provided him with a house in the Forum. It was a foothold in the very centre of Rome which the cash-strapped Caesar, modestly housed in the Subura, had previously lacked.